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Thomas Carlyle in 1876. 



Frontispu. 



K\ft acatnuD Classics 



CARLYLE '^:^>vc.wv<^ 

ESSAY ON BURNS 



EDITED BY 

HENRY W^'^BOYNTON 



WITH INTRODUCTION ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF 

THOMAS CARLYLE AND OF ROBEI^T BURNS; 

NOTES; SELECTIONS FROM THE 

POEMS OF BURNS; AND 

A GLOSSARY 



ALLYN AND BACON 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 

ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 






COPYRIGHT, 1922. 
BY HENRY W- BOYNTON 



C1A690199 



NorinooU ^xtss 

J. S. Gushing Co. —Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



JAN 30 '23 



PREFACE 

This edition of Carlyle's famous essay includes, besides 
full notes on the text, enough material to make clear the 
source and setting of the essay. The Introduction also gives 
a short account of the lives of both Burns and Carlyle, with 
a view especially to bringing out the relations and differ- 
ences between the two great Scotchmen. The section which 
touches on the Scottish sources of Burns's inspiration and 
method ought to prove of value. 

In order that high school students may be able to get 
the gist of Burns, in an introductory sense, from this single 
volume, his best poems and songs are collected in an Appen- 
dix, with the necessary Glossary. Some of this verse needs 
much less use of the Glossary than the rest ; and it is assumed 
that the teacher will assign poems for reading in accordance 
with the quality of his classes, and the time at their disposal. 

H. W. BOYNTON. 



ui 



CONTENTS 

I PAGE 

I List of Illustrations . vi 

1 

INTRODUCTION 

Thomas Carlyle vii 

Life vii 

Work xii 

Robert Burns xvi 

Life xvi 

Work . . . xviii 

Carlyle 's Summary of the Essay on Burns . . xxii 

TEXT 1 

NOTES 67 

SELECTIONS FROM BURNS'S POEMS . . . . &5 

GLOSSARY 131 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Thomas Carlyle in 1876 . . . . . . Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

Carlyle in His Prime xii 

Burns's Cottage, Ayr xvi 

Robert Burns 1 

Alloway Kirk, Ayr 70 

" Tam o' Shanter " Inn, Ayr 107 



VI 



INTRODUCTION 

THOMAS CARLYLE. 
LIFE. 

Thomas Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, 
on the fourth of December, 1795. Ecclefechan is only about 
ten miles from the Border, in a region which has bred the 
most independent and stubborn race of the lowland Scots. 
James Carlyle, the father, was a step above the peasant class, 
being a mason by trade, and later a small farmer; he was 
the true type of Scottish Calvinist, honest, independent, 
and stern. Thomas was the first of the nine children of this 
man and his second wife, Janet Aitken. He was a pug- 
nacious schoolboy, but so eager a student at the local parish 
school and the neighboring grammar school in Annan, that 
his father determined to make a minister of him. This was 
the usual ambition of a clever Scotch boy. James Carlyle 
belonged to a small sect which had split off from the "Kirk," 
the Established Church of Scotland. His son accepted the 
idea of the ministry as the natural goal of scholarship ; and 
a scholar he was bound to be. In November, 1809, he 
walked to Edinburgh and entered the University. He was 
not quite fourteen. '\ 

At Edinburgh he learned something of the classics, and 
showed a bent for mathematics. But he got quite as much 
from his fellow-students, most of them poor and serious- 
minded like himself, as from his studies ; and he seems to have 
stood high in their esteem. He was never a good ** mixer," 
however; but for a few devoted friendships, his world lay 

vii 



viii Introduction. 

all his life among books rather than men. The first and 
warmest of these friendships began when, after two years 
of teaching in Annan, near his old home, he began another 
two years' teaching at Kirkcaldy, and there met Edward 
Irving. Irving also came from Annandale. He was some 
three years older than Carlyle, a brilliant irregular genius; 
a personality of force and charm, under whose influence 
Carlyle long remained. They did not agree in religious 
matters. Irving was already a licensed preacher, and left 
Kirkcaldy in 1818 in order to enter the active ministry. Car- 
lyle also was ready to stop teaching ; it was not his natural 
work. But he had by this time given up the idea of the min- 
istry. The rigid creed of the Scottish church was too much 
for him. He studied law for a time, but did not take to it. 
He tried a little private teaching, and wrote some articles for 
the ** Edinburgh Encyclopaedia." His religious doubts in- 
creased, and for a time he was in a desperate mood, ready 
to deny everything. He escaped the mood of denial, the 
** Everlasting No," (as he describes it in ** Sartor Resartus ") 
and attained the "Everlasting Yea," the spirit of affirmation 
— not a creed, but a "working philosophy" of courage and 
of honest service. 

By this time Carlyle had begun other studies. German 
thought and literature were just beginning to be known in 
Britain. Carlyle played a leading part in interpreting the 
German mind and art to the English mind. He revered 
Goethe, especially as one who had passed through a spir- 
itual struggle like his own, and who had "found himself." 
During two or three years in which Carlyle held a comfort- 
able berth as a private tutor in London, he worked on a 
"Life of Schiller," and on his translation of Goethe's "Wil- 
helm Meister," which Goethe himself was to crown with 
praise. The post of tutor could not hold one of Carlyle's 
temper long. He resigned it in 1824. He had no prospects, 



Thomas Carlyle. ix 

vas past his first youth, and had hcgnn to siiiVer from the dys- 
)epsia which was to be his lifelong torment. He tried to 
nake a living as a wTiter in London. But London's interest 
n German literature faded out, and Carlyle would not stoop 
o the hackwork of the fellow-scribblers he despised. He 
vas conscious of unusual powers, but did not know how to 
pply them and keep alive. 

And he was asking a brilliant and sensitive woman to 
narry him. In this relation, also, Edward Irving was in- 
/olved. While schoolmastering at Haddington in Scotland, 
[rving had been interested in a clever and charming pupil, 
lane Baillie Welsh. He became engaged later to a Kirk- 
jaldy maiden, but continued to visit Haddington. Jane 
Welsh was growing up ; and it was clear before long that the 
feeling between them was stronger than friendship. He 
appealed for release from the Kirkcaldy maiden; but her 
relatives w^ould not let him off and, faithful to the code of 
the time, he married her. Meanwhile he had introduced 
Jane Welsh and Carlyle, and Carlyle, knowing nothing of 
the blighted affair between the two, became her suitor. She 
hesitated, for Carlyle was a degree below her socially, and had 
the strangeness of genius. As daughter of a physician, she 
had been comfortably reared. After some years of hesita- 
tion, she consented to marry him, whenever he could support 
her decently. Apparently he thought she ought to be willing 
to "take a chance" as wife of a man of genius who might 
always be a poor man. They were married, and he failed 
for a long time to support her decently, nor would he debase 
his talents to the business of supporting her decently. Under 
the conditions, her spirit and conduct were admirable. They 
were always devoted companions; but it was impossible 
that her high-spirited nature and his grim absorption in one 
thing — his work — should not have clashed at times. Car- 
lyle lacked the gallantries and delicacies of breeding. Only 



X Introduction. 

after his wife's death does he seem to have suspected what 
her sensitiveness must have suffered at his rude hands. His 
remorse and his efforts at atonement are among the most 
touching matters recorded in Hterary biography. 

They were married in October, 1826, and first settled in 
Edinburgh. The " Edinburgh Review" was then the leading 
magazine of its kind in Great Britain. In Edinburgh rather 
than in London the reputations of authors and critics were 
made and destroyed. It was the " Edinburgh Review " which 
tried to dispose of Wordsworth with the famous phrase of 
contempt, "This will never do." It was the "Edinburgh 
Review" which earned Byron's furious attack in "English 
Bards and Scotch Reviewers." It was the "Edinburgh 
Review" which was supposed to have sneered Keats to death. 
Its influence was conventional and conservative. Lord Jeffrey, 
its editor, could not be in sympathy with such a genius and 
point of view as Carlyle's. But he greatly admired Mrs. 
Carlyle, and chiefly for her sake, it appears, accepted a num- 
ber of articles from Carlyle at this time. These included 
essays on "Richter" and "German Literature," and the 
review of Lockhart's "Life of Robert Burns" which has be- 
come known as the "Essay on Burns." 

For a time matters went fairly well. Carlyle made a little 
money, and sent his brother John to study in Germany. But 
it was not long before he was in straits. He tried and failed 
to get a professorship at St. Andrews. In 1828 the Carlyles 
had to retreat to the country. Mrs. Carlyle's mother owned 
a farm at Craigenputtock which Carlyle's brother Alexander 
was now trying to farm. Thomas took a cottage nearby, 
and settled to the writing of " Sartor Resartus." For several 
years he did no other writing, except a few reviews (among 
them the review of Croker's edition of "Boswell's Life of 
Johnson"). There was almost no money coming in, John was 
failing as a doctor in London, and Alexander as a farmer at 



Thomas Carlyle. xi 

Jraigenputtock. Jeffrey was a good friend, lent Carlyle 
Tioney, and offered to settle an annuity on him. This Car- 
yle refused to take, having in full that pride of independence 
3f which he accuses, or with which he credits, Burns. 

In 1833 the Carlyles gave up the country and returned to 
Edinburgh. There, luckily, Carlyle stumbled on the mate- 
rials for "The Diamond Necklace," and was thereby led to 
the studies from which his great "French Revolution" was 
to result. "Sartor Resartus" came out, but failed, as a 
serial in "Eraser's." Its humor was too elaborate and far- 
fetched to catch an audience for an as yet little-known au- 
thor. But one great thing had happened to Carlyle at Craig- 
enputtock. That was the visit of the American, Ralph 
Waldo Emerson. The two men of genius became fast 
friends; their published correspondence is a treasure of 
literature. Emerson was among Carlyle's first admirers. 
He even admired "Sartor Resartus" ; and it was he who first 
got it out in book form, in America. Carlyle was to live to 
see a large popular edition printed and sold in England. But 
it was the "French Revolution" which gave him his first 
hearing at home. In 1834 the Carlyles had turned their 
backs on Scotland, and taken the house in Chelsea (Lon- 
don) where Carlyle stayed till his death. He began to 
make important friends, among them John Stuart JVIill. 
Mill encouraged him to begin the " French Revolution." The 
manuscript of the first volume was burnt by accident while in 
Mill's hands. Carlyle started all over again, and finished 
the great book in 1837. 

Its publication gave Carlyle his first large recognition. 
From that point matters began to mend. He became known 
as a lecturer, and through a series of years gave a number of 
profitable courses, though "Heroes and Hero-Worship " was 
the only one to be pul)lished. Unhappily, as their fortunes 
improved, relations between Carlyle and his wife became 



xii Introduction. 

badly strained. For some years they lived at cross-purpose 
the fault being chiefly Carlyle's. Mrs. Carlyle was a sensij 
tive and high-strung woman, whose devotion Carlyle, wit 
more than a trace of the Scotch peasant in his manner an 
point of view, failed to recognize as generously as he should 
have. After her death her journals revealed to him some- 
thing of what she had suffered. His last years were a lonr 
penance. His last works, the "Reminiscences" and the 
*' Letters and Memorials" were largely tributes to her mem- 
ory. In 1865, the year before her death,' he had finished 
his great work on "Frederick the Great," and had been made 
Rector of the University of Edinburgh. His health w;i; 
broken, his work was virtually done. He passed the re- 
mainder of his years in retirement, though not deserted 1)} 
his friends; and died on the fourth of February, 18S1 
He might have been buried in Westminster Abbey, among 
the greatest of England's dead, but his wish was to be put 
beside his parents in the little graveyard at Ecclefechan. 
He left his books to Harvard College. 

WORK. 

Carlyle was a thinker at odds with his generation. He 
was a prophet with the soul of an idealist and the eye of a 
pessimist. He was a dreamer who could not make his dream i 
come true. The stern inheritance of his Calvinistic father^^ 
and his physical ill-health united to give him a gloomy view 
of man as he is. He hated and endlessly denounced th 
shams, the cant, the materialism, and the social tyranny o 
his day. He was the champion of his own class. He stoo< ■ 
for the people against the hereditary ruling class. Thi 
could be understood. But he was, on the other hand, ayi 
ardent "hero-worshipper." He believed that the world has 
always owed its salvation in crises, and its progress as a whole 
to its few great men. One by one, he held, they have repre- 




Thomas Carlyle in His Prime. 



Thomas Curly le. xiii 

sented divinity and authority among men, whether they 
might be poets or statesmen or conquerors or great religious 
leaders. Therefore he was in the position of preaching au- 
thority while denouncing tyranny. He was accused of 
identifying might and right because he believed in a strong 
hand at the helm of government. In a way he was a radical ; 
but the sort of radical who demands not only revolution 
but constructive reform. Here he parted company with 
John Stuart Mill and other radicals of his time (as of our 
time) who seemed to believe that if the tearing down of ex- 
isting institutions could only be done thoroughly, the re- 
building would somehow take care of itself. Carlyle's mys- 
ticism was less visionary than the woolgathering of these 
people. He hated tyranny, but he hated anarchy more; 
just as he hated the petrified forms of religion, but hated 
irreligion more. 

Carlyle's mysticism had much in common with the mys- 
ticism, or transcendentalism, of the Germans he is always 
quoting, and of his friend and contemporary Emerson. He 
believed profoundly in the inner meaning of common things, 
as well as in a great "Secret of the Universe" which it is the 
province of genius to interpret to mankind. Again and 
again he enforces this truth in the course of his "essays and 
biographies and lectures. This is what he means by a 
"Hero," — an interpreter. For this quality he "worships" 
figures so different as Samuel Johnson and Shakespeare, 
Luther and Rousseau, Cromwell and Burns. His creed is 
summed up as well as anywhere in a passage of " The Hero 
as Man of Letters " (" Heroes and Hero-Worship") : " Litera- 
ture, so far as it is Literature, is an * apocalypse of Nature,' a 
revealing of the * open secret.' It may well enough be named, 
in Fichte's style, a 'continuous revelation' of the Godlike in 
the Terrestrial and Common. The Godlike does ever, in very 
truth, endure there ; is brought out, now in this dialect, now in 



xiv Introduction. 

that, with various degrees of clearness ; all true gifted Singersi 
and Speakers are, consciously or unconsciously, doing so. 
The dark stormful indignation of a Byron, so wayward and 
perverse, may have touches of it ; nay, the withered mockery 
of a French skeptic, — his mockery of the False, a love and 
worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony 
of a Shakespeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral-music of a! 
Milton ! They are something, too, those humble genuinej 
lark-notes of a Burns, — a skylark, starting from the humblej 
furrow, far overhead in the blue depths, and singing so genu- 
inely to us there ! For all true singing is of the nature of 
worship ; as indeed all true working may be said to be, 
whereof such singing is but the record, and fit melodiousi 
representation, to us." 

Carlyle's style was his own, a product partly of his rudej 
and vivid northern fancy, and partly of his German studies. 
In his constant use of capitals, in his fondness for long com- 
pounds and for inversions of syntax, the German influence 
shows itself. Matthew Arnold warned his generation against! 
the spread of "Carlylese"; and indeed there could be noj 
worse style to imitate. It has, on the other hand, strong; 
individual merits. It is vivid, picturesque, forceful. T 
sometimes fantastic, it is often deeply imaginative. Am 
it has a salt and pungent savor without which the nineteent ■ 
century literature of England would be a different dish. 

As a summary estimate of Carlyle's quality and influence 
we cannot do better than to quote from the careful opinior 
of James Russell Lowell : 

" The great merit of the essays lay in a criticism based on wide 
and various study, which, careless of tradition, applied its standard 
to the real and not the contemporary worth of the literary or othe? 
performance to be judged, and in an unerring eye for that fleeting 
expression of the moral features of character, a perception of whict 
alone makes the drawing of a coherent likeness possible. Thei] 



Thomas Carlyle. xv 

defect was a tendency, gaining; strength with years, to confound the 
moral with the aesthetic standard, and to make the value of an au- 
thor's work dependent on the general force of his nature rather than 
on its special fitness for a given task. But, with all deductions, he 
remains the profoundest critic and the most dramatic imagination 
of modern times. His manner is not so well suited to the historian 
as to the essayist. He is always great in single figures and striking 
episodes, but there is neither gradation nor continuity. He sees 
history, as it were, by flashes of lighting. He makes us acquainted 
with the isolated spot where we happen to be when the flash comes, 
as if by actual eyesight, but there is no possibility of a comprehen- 
sive view. No other writer compares with him for vividness. With 
the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the greatest of epic poets 
.since Homer. . . . 

" Though not the safest of guides in politics or practical philoso- 
phy, his value as an inspirer and awakener cannot be overestimated. 
It is a power which belongs only to the highest order of minds, for 
it is none but a divine fire that can so kindle and irradiate. The 
debt due him from those who listened to the teachings of his prime 
for revealing to them what sublime reserves of power even the hum- 
blest may find in manliness, sincerity, and self-reliance, can be paid 
with nothing short of reverential gratitude. As a purifier of the 
sources whence our intellectual inspiration is dra^vn, his influence 
has been second only to that of Wordsworth, if even to his." 



ROBERT BURNS. 
LIFE. 

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759. His father, 
William Burnes or Burness, was socially a degree below Car- 
lyle's father ; not a farmer, but a " crofter " ; that is, he rented 
a few acres on the banks of Doon, a mile or two from the 
town of Ayr. There in a two-roomed thatched cottage, the 
poet was born, the first of seven children. The father was 
(like Carlyle's father) a man of strong character and intelli- 
gence, and ambitious for his children. Robert Burns went 
to the best schools that could be reached and afforded, but 
these could not take him far ; and by his tenth year his regu- 
lar schooling was over. Luckily there were a few good books 
in the home: Pope's "Iliad," "The Spectator," the poems 
of Ramsay and Fergusson, " Ossian," a collection of English 
songs, and above all, the Bible. Burns was by no means, as 
Carlyle alleges, "without instruction, without model." 

And from his mother and an old woman who lived in the 
family he learned great store of country legends and folk- 
songs of the Border region. At fifteen he wrote his first song, 
("to the tune of her favorite reel") in honor of "Handsome 
Nell," a harvest-companion. By this time his father had 
taken a larger farm at Mount Oliphant ; and when Burns 
was about twenty, settled at Lochlea in Tarbolton. The 
Burns family were hard-working and honest, but never got 
much above poverty Robert grew up to take, as eldest 
son, more than his full share of the farm work. But he 
was not satisfied with the hard routine of family life. His 
nature demanded gayety. At sixteen he learned to dance. 



Robert Burns. xvii 

against th(> wishes of his pious parents; and he ])egan to be 
always in love, and, as he said later, was "in the secret of 
half the loves of the parish." PTe was otherwise experiment- 
ing with life, — studied surveying, helped found a debating 
society, the "Bachelors' Club," and so on. From the first, 
his verse-making grew out of his human experiences and 
contacts, as well as out of his knowledge of the poetry of 
the past. 

In 1782, at twenty-three, he w^nt to the town of Irvine 
and tried his hand at the trade of flax-dressing. The ex- 
periment failed, partly through ill-luck, partly through his 
own fault. It was at Irvine that he had his first real ex- 
perience of wild company, and fell into hal)its of dissipation : 
and what was worse, lost his respect for the principles of 
personal morality in which he had been brought up. 

His failure to get on in the world sobered him somewhat, 
and he returned to Lochlea. Matters there were in des- 
perate case. Burns the elder w-as ill and hopelessly in debt. 
Death released him in 1784. Robert and his brother Gilbert 
contrived to save enough from the wreck of the family for- 
tunes to rent the small farm of Mossgiel. Here they found 
the familiar hard toil and small returns. But at this time 
Burns met Jean Armour, who afterwards became his wdfe ; and 
during the next few years he produced much of his best poetry. 
However, it was a kind of accident that brought him his 
first recognition as a poet beyond the praises of his rustic 
neighbors. Two years of crop failure at Mossgiel, and vari- 
ous private troubles, so discouraged him that he determined 
to leave Scotland. He had the promise of a clerical post 
in Jamaica. To get passage money, he collected some of his 
poems and had them printed. He was about to take passage 
for Jamaica when news came that his book was rousing en- 
thusiasm in Edinburgh and that there was demand for more 
of his work. 



xviii Introduction. 

Then followed a few untroubled years. He went to Edin- 
burgh, and "carried all classes by storm with the brilliance 
and force of his personality." In 1787 a second and much 
larger edition of his poems came out, and brought him 
£500, the equivalent of say $4000 to-day. Nearly half 
of this he gave to his brother Gilbert, to help him hold 
Mossgiel. With the rest he bought a farm in Dumfriesshire, 
— Ellisland, another disastrous bargain for the farmer-poet. 
To make ends meet, and partly because it was a job which 
brought him into varied contact with men, he got a position 
as a "ganger," an officer of the "excise," or, as we say, a 
revenue officer. Ellisland having proved a complete failure, 
he moved with his wife and family to the town of Dumfries 
(1791), where he lived till his death. The first flush of his 
popularity as a poet waned, and he had no notion of de- 
liberately writing poems for money. The excise business 
became increasingly distasteful, he fell a prey to a crew of 
"toping worshippers"; and the end was not far off. Pov- 
erty and drink and the broken spirits of one who has seen the 
heights and failed to reach them, hastened his death. On 
July 21, 1796, at the age of thirty-seven, his uneas}' years 
came to an end. 

WORK. 

Burns's poetry is the product of two distinct and often 
warring influences. There was the eighteenth century Eng- 
lish influence, out of books ; with its standards of conven- 
tional elegance, of " polite" substance and formal style. And 
there was the influence of the broad and vigorous Scotch 
tongue and folk-literature to which he was bred. The first 
influence produced his prose and a good deal of verse which 
we value largely because it is his. The second influence 
produced all the best of his poems and songs and set him 
among the immortals. 



Robert Burns. xix 

Let us understand that the lowhmd Scotch tonj^jue was 
and is something more than a vulgar and shifting dialect. 
It is a composite tongue; hut hardly more so than modern 
English. It derives from a Northumbrian form of Old Eng- 
lish, an Anglian tongue which was given a strong Scandi- 
navian flavor by the Danish and Norse settlers in Northum- 
bria. It retained also more than a tincture of the Gaelic of 
the older inhabitants of the Border region, who were driven 
North, or remained to be assimilated in blood and speech by 
the lowland race. In the twelfth century and later the low- 
land speecli was further enlarged and colored by many French 
words and idioms w^hich came partly from the Norman con- 
querors of England, and partly from France during the long 
period when the French and the Scotch were allied against 
England. There were of course local dialects of the Scotch 
as there were and are of the English. Words and variants 
in form are met in Burns's poetry which belonged peculiarly 
to his own Ayrshire. But one who can read Burns will have 
little difficulty in reading the broad Scotch passages in later 
writers, from Scott to Barrie. 

Nor was this tongue, in Burns's time, without its own lit- 
erary traditions. Half a century earlier, Allan Ramsay 
had not only written poems of his own in the vernacular, 
but had collected and published a large number of ancient 
Scottish poems and songs which had hitherto existed only 
in manuscript or on the tongues of the people. In his own 
verse he used, like Burns, the broad Scotch in merry and 
spontaneous expression, and a rather stilted English when he 
wished to be serious. Robert Fergusson was born only nine 
years before Burns, but lived out his brief and tragic career 
while Burns w-as still a schoolboy. It was only in the last of his 
few years that he was beginning to realize that his best work 
lay in the use of the humble but genuine Scotch of his birth 
rather than in the highflown English of the literary England 



XX Introduction. 

of that period. He was feeble in body and in will. He lived 
loosely and died in a madhouse. But he was a man of genius, 
to whom Burns paid full tribute. What Burns owed him is 
admirably summed up by J. G. Dow, in the Introduction 
to his "Selections from the Poems of Robert Burns ": 

" Inheriting the Scotch tradition which Ramsay had once more 
popularized, and the public which Ramsay had awakened, Fer- 
gusson likewise inherited the elder poet's 'spunk o' glee,' the broad 
fun and sly satire which were so acceptable to his audience, and that 
love of nature which brings a waft of countrv air into his city poems. 
His genius, singularly void of passion, and immature in all except a 
precocious tone of reflective wisdom, is that of the townsman born 
and bred who loves and misses the country. His subjects are drawn 
mainly from city and suburban hfe; he paints the humors of Auld 
Reekie and hits off her characters with deft good nature, banters 
the lords and advocates of the Session, satirically moralizes on the 
respectability of the citizen's broadcloth, preaches to his fellow club- 
men, with mock gravity, on the virtues of cold water, wakens the 
ghosts that haunt the Canongate, and collogues with plainstanes 
and causey on the High Street. But he gladly listens to the 
song of the gowdspink, his eye catches the butterfly in the 
thoroughfare, and he passes in fancy to the rustic joys of the 
farmer's ingle. His style of treatment is humorous, pathetic, and 
moralistic. In these and other respects his relation to Burns is so 
close that it would almost seem as if his entire equipment, his humor, 
satire, and sagacity, his sympathy with nature and his warm human- 
ity, his vivid sight of his object, even his diction and versification, 
had been transplanted into the richer soil of Burns's mind, and flour- 
ished there anew." 

As Carlyle says, it is in his songs that Burns (like Fer- 
gusson) is greatest. Their origin is full of interest ; and the 
student may well read the parts of Professor Dow's " Intro- 
duction " from which we have just quoted, on '' Scottish Song 
and Music Before Burns," and " Burns's Work in Its Relation 
to the Past." Very briefly: Scotch song grew out of Scotch 
music. The air of the lowlands was full of old melodies, 
usually known by the name of some song which had at some 



Robert Burns. xxi 

time been sung to the given tune ; but constantly changing as 
they passed from one ear, and one generation, to another. 
For instance, there is the tune (or theme) known as " Lady 
Cassilis' Lilt." "In this old Melody," says Dow, "we can 
see the source of the plaintive strains of 'The Bonie House 
of Airlie,' and ' A Wee Bird Cam to Our Ha' Door ' ; a differ- 
ent modulation of the same air gives us 'Hey Tutti Taitie,' 
whose tenderness appears in ' The Land of the Leal ' ; and 
with only a slight change of accent this pathos is transformed 
into the martial bravery of 'Scots Wha Hae.'" Whether 
Burns was a bad singer or not (as his old schoolmaster said he 
was), his inward ear was full of these melodies. One of them 
would get to ringing in his head, and gradually words would 
form to match the tune, according to his mood of the hour. 
In this way nearly all his songs came into l)eing. In many 
instances not only the tune, but some rude version of the 
words lay ready to his hand. His task (like Shakespeare's) 
was to use and perfect the materials of his age, rather than 
to invent those materials. For the rest, Robert Louis 
Stevenson has said all that need be said here of Burns 
the Maker : 

"To homely subjects Burns communicated the rich com- 
mentary of his nature ; they were all steeped in Burns ; and 
they interest us not in themselves, but because they have 
been passed through the spirit of so genuine and vigorous 
a man," 

A. T. Quiller-Couch has a suggestive comment on the fact 
that Robert Burns, not Walter Scott or any other, is the idol 
of all Scotchmen the world over. It is, he surmises, "the 
homeliness of Burns that appeals to them as a wandering race. 
It is because in farthest exile a line of Burns takes their hearts 
straight back to Scotland." 



CARLYLE'S SUMMARY OF THE ESSAY ON 
BURNS. 

{The headings arc the present editor's.) 

Introduction. Burns and His Biographers. Pages 1-5. 

Our grand maxim of supply and demand. Living misery and 
posthumous glory. The character of Burns a theme that cannot 
easily become exhausted. His Biographers. Perfection in Biog- 
raphy. 

Body. I. Summing-up of Burns's Character and Work. 
Pages 5-10. 

Burns one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth 
century : an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen. His hard 
and most disadvantageous conditions. Not merely as a Poet, but 
as a Man, that he chiefly interests and afTects us. His life a deeper 
tragedy than any brawling Napoleon's. His heart, erring and at 
length broken, full of inborn riches, of love to all living and lifeless 
things. The Peasant Poet bears himself among the low, with whom 
his lot is cast, like a King in exile. 

II. Burns as Poet. 

(1) Sincerity. Pages 10-18. 

His Writings but a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him, 
yet of a quality enduring as the Enghsh tongue. He wrote, not 
from hearsay, but from sight and actual experience. This, easy as 
it looks, the fundamental difficulty which all poets have to strive 
with. Byron, heartily as he detested insincerity, far enough from 
faultless. No poet of Burns's susceptibility from first to last so to- 
tally free from affectation. Some of his Letters, however, by no 
means deserve this praise. His singular power of making all sub- 
jects, even the most homely, interesting. Wherever there is a sky 
above him, and a worlS around him, the poet is in his place. Every 
genius an impossibility till he appears. 



Robert Burns. xxiii 

(2) Inaight and Frrlifu/. Tages 18-27. 

Burns's ru,'j;ged earnest truth, >'et tenderness and sweet native 
grace. His clear, graphic ' descriptive touches ' and piercing em- 
phasis of thought. Professor Stewart's testimony to Burns's intel- 
lectual vigour. A deeper insight than any 'doctrine of association.' 
In the Poetry of Burns keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness 
of feeling. Loving Indignation and good Hatred: Scots Wha Hae; 
Macphcrsons Farewell: Sunny buoyant floods of Humour. 

(3) The Poet at Worst and Best. Pages 27-35. 

Imperfections of Burns's poetry : Tarn o' Shanter, not a true poem 
so much as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; The Jolly Beggars, the 
most complete and perfect as a poetical composition. His Songs 
the most truly inspired and most deeply felt of all his poems. His 
influence on the hearts and literature of his country : Literary pa- 
triotism. 

III. Burns as Man. 

(1) Unfavorable Conditions of His Youth. Pages 35^1. 

Burns's acted Works even more interesting than his written ones ; 
and these too, alas, but a fragment. His passionate youth never 
passed into clear and steadfast manhood. The only true happi- 
ness of a man : Often it is the greatest minds that are latest in ob- 
taining it : Burns and Byron. Burns's hard-worked, yet happy 
boyhood: His estimable parents. Early dissipations. In Neces- 
sity and Obedience a man should find his highest Freedom. 

(2) Troubles of His Later Years. Pages 41^7. 

Religious quarrels and scepticisms. Faithlessness : Exile and 
blackest desperation. Invited to Edinburgh : A Napoleon among 
the crowned sovereigns of Literature. Sir Walter ■ Scott's reminis- 
cence of an interview with Burns. Burns's calm, manly bearing 
amongst the Edinburgh aristocracy. His bitter feeling of his own 
indigence. By the great he is treated in the customary fashion; 
and each party goes his several way. 

(3) What Remedy? Pages 47-53. 

What Burns was next to do, or to avoid : His Excise-and-Farm 
scheme not an unreasonable one : No failure of external means, but 



xxiv Introduction. 

of internal, that overtook Burns. Good beginnings. Patrons ol 
genius and picturesque tourists : Their moral rottenness, by which 
he became infected, gradually eats out the heart of his life. Meteorsl 
of French Politics rise before him, but they are not his stars. Cal-! 
umny is busy with him. The little great-folk of Dumfries : Burns's 
desolation. In his destitution and degradation one act of self- 
devotedness still open to him : Not as a hired soldier, but as a pa- 
triot, would he strive for the glory of his country. The crisis of 
his life : Death. 

(4) No Remedy — for a Burns. Pages 53-57. 

Little effectual help could perhaps have been rendered to Burns : 
Patronage twice cursed : Many a poet has been poorer, none 
prouder. And yet much might have been done to have made his 
humble atmosphere more genial. Little Babylons and Babylo 
nians : Let us go and do otherwise. The market-price of Wisdom 
Not in the power of any mere external circumstances to ruin the 
mind of a man. The errors of Burns to be mourned over, rather 
than blamed. The great want of his life was the great want of his 
age, a true faith in Religion and a singleness and unselfishness of 
aim. 

Conclusion. The Tragedy of Genius. Pages 57-65. 

Poetry, as Burns could and ought to have followed it, is but a 
other form of Wisdom, of Religion. For his culture as a Poet, p( 
erty and much suffering for a season were absolutely advantageoi 
To divide his hours between poetry and rich men's banquets an i 
starred attempt. Byron, rich in worldly means and honours, l 
whit happier than Burns in his poverty and worldly degradation 
They had a message from on High to deliver, which could leave the 
no rest while it remained unaccomplished. Death and the rest » 
the grave : A stern moral, twice told us in our own time. Tht 
world habitually unjust in its judgments of such men. With men 
of right feeling anywhere, there will be no need to plead for Burns : 
In pitying admiration he lies enshrined in all our hearts. 



Robert Burns. 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS, 



[Edinburgh Beview, No. 96. 1828.] 

' In" the modern arrangements of society, it is no uncom« 
mon thing +^^hat a man of genius must, like Butler, 'ask 
for bread and receive a stogie ; ' for, in spite of our grand 
maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means the high- 
est excellence that men are most forward to recognize. 
The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his 
reward in his own day ; but the writer of a true poem, 
like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the 
contrary. We do not know whether it is not an aggrar 
vation of the injustice, that there is generally a posthu- 
mous retribution. Robert Burns, in the course of Nature, 
might yet have been living ; but his short life was spent 
in toil and penury ; and he died, in the prime of his man- 
hood, miserable and neglected : and yet already a brave 
mausoleum shines over his dust, and more than one splen- 
did monument has been reared in other places to his fame ; 
the street where he languished in poverty is called by his 
name ; the highest personages in our literature have been 
proud to appear as his commentators and admirers ; and 
here is the sixth narrative of his Life that has been given 
to the world ! 

>. Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this 
new attempt on such a subject : but his readers, we believe, 
will readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will censure only 

1 



2 Carlyle. 

the performance of his task, not the choice of it. The 
character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot easily 
become either trite or exhausted ; and will probably gain 
rather than lose in its dimensions by the distance to which 
it is removed by Time. No man, it has been said, is a 
hero to his valet ; and this is probably true ; but the fault 
is at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. For 
it is certain that to the vulgar eye few things are wonder- 
ful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to believe 
that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay, perhaps 
painfully feel, toiling at their side through the poor jos- 
tlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than themselves. 
Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas 
Lucy's, and neighbor of John a Combe's, had snatched an 
hour or two from the preservation of his game, and written 
us a Life of Shakspeare ! What dissertations should we 
not have had, — not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on 
the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant 
laws ; and how the Poacher became a Player ; and how 
Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and did 
not push him to extremities ! In like manner, we believe, 
with respect to Burns, that till the companions of his 
pilgrimage, the Honorable Excise Commissioners, and the 
Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, and the Dumfries 
Aristocracy, and all the Squires and Earls, equally with 
the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old Light Clergy, 
whom he had to do with, shall have become invisible in the 
darkness of the Past, or visible only by light borrowed from 
/ws juxtaposition, it will be difficult to measure him by any 
true standard, or to estimate what he really was and did, in 
the eighteenth century, for his country and the world. It 
will be difficult, we say ; but still a fair problem for literary 
historians ; and repeated attempts will give us repeated 
approximations. 
? His former Biographers have done something, no doubt, 



Essay on Burns. 3 

but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie and 
Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, we 
think, mistaken one essentially important thing : Their 
own and the Avorld's true relation to their author, and 
the style in which it became such men to think and to 
speak of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the poet truly ; 
moi'e perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or even to 
himself; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain 
patronizing, apologetic air; as if the ],)olite iniblic might 
think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of 
science, a scholar and gentleman, should do such honor to 
a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his 
fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith; and 
regret that the first and kindest of all our poet's l)iogra- 
pliers should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly 
what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the 
same kind : and both err alike in presenting us with a 
detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, 
virtues and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting 
character as a living unity. This, however, is not painting 
a portrait; but gauging the length and breadth of the 
several features, and jotting down their dimensions in 
arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much as that: for 
we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the mind 
could be so measured and gauged. 

^ Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both 
these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and 
remarkable man the public voice has now pronounced him 
to be : and in delineating him, he has avoided the method 
of separate generalities, and rather sought for characteristic 
incidents, habits, actions, sayings ; in a word, for aspects 
which exhibit the whole man, as he looked and lived among 
his fellows. The book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, 
gives more insight, we think, into the true character of 
Burns, than any prior biography : though, being written on 



4__ Carlyle. 

the very popular and condensed scheme of an article fo 
Constable's Miscellany, it has less depth than we could have 
wished and expected from a writer of such power ; and con- 
tains rather more, and more multifarious quotations than 
belong of right to an original production. Indeed, Mr. 
Lockhart's own writing is generally so good, so clear, direct, 
and nervous, that we seldom wish to see it making place for 
another man's. However, the spirit of the work is through- 
out candid, tolerant, and anxiously conciliating 5 compli- 
ments and praises are liberally distributed, on all hands, to 
great and small ; and, as Mr. Morris Birkbeck observes of 
^ the society in the backwoods of America, ' the courtesies of 
polite life are never lost sight of for a moment.' But there 
are better things than these in the volume; and we can 
safely testify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly read 
a first time, but may even be without difficulty read agaii't. 
\Sr Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the problem 
j of Burns' s Biography has yet been adequately solved. We 
_\ do not allude so much to deficiency of facts or documents, 
though of these we are still every day receiving some 
fresh accession, — as to the limited and imperfect applicar 
tion of them to the great end of Biography. Our notions 
upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant ; but if 
an individual is really of consequence enough to have his 
life and character recorded for public remembrance, we 
have always been of opinion that the public ought to be 
made acquainted with all the inward springs and relations 
of his character. /How did the world and man's life, from 
his particular position, represent themselves to his mind ? 
How did coexisting circumstances modify him from with- 
out ; how did he modify these from within ? With what 
endeavors and what efficacy rule over them; with what 
resistance and what suffering sink under them ? In one 
word, what and how produced was the effect of society on 
him; what and how produced was his effect on society?! 



Essay on Burns. te^ 

He who should answer these questions, in regard to any 
individual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfec- 
tion in Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can deserve 
such a study ; and many lives will be written, and, for the 
gratification of innocent curiosity, ought to be written, and 
read and forgotten, which are not in this sense biographies. 
But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of these few individuals; 
and such a study, at least with such a result, he has not yet 
obtained. Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be 
but scanty and feeble ; but we offer them with good- will, 
and trust they may meet with acceptance from those they 
are intended for. <^ 

^Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy ; and was, 
in that character, entertained by it, in the usual fashion, 
with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding 
into censure and neglect ; till his early and most mournful 
death again awakened an enthusiasm for him, which, espe- 
cially as there was now nothing to be done, and much to be 
spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own time. It is true, 
the ' nine days ' have long since elapsed ; and the very con- 
tinuance of this clamor proves that Burns was no vulgar 
wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judgments, where, as 
years passed by, he has come to rest more and more exclu- 
sively on his own intrinsic merits, and may now be well-nigh 
shorn of that casual radiance, he appears not only as a true 
British poet, but as one of the most considerable British 
men of the eighteenth century. Let it not be objected that 
he did little. He did much, if we consider where and how. 
If the work performed was small, we must remember that 
he had his very materials to discover; for the metal he 
worked in lay hid under the desert, where no eye but his 
had guessed its existence ; and we may almost say that with 
his own hand he had to construct the tools for fashioning it. 
For he found himself in deepest obscurity, without help. 



5 Carlyle. 

without instruction, without model ; or with models only of 
the meanest sort, ""'An educated man stands, as it were, in 
the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with 
all the weapons and engines which man's skill has been able 
to devise from the earliest time ; and he works, accordingly, 
with a strength borrowed from all past ages. How different 
is his state who stands on the outside of that storehouse, and 
feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain forever shut 1 
against him ! His means are the commonest and rudest ; 
the mere work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf 
behind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but no 
dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe : and he must be 
a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms. 
/ It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. Born 
in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and in a 
condition the most disadvantageous, where his mind, if it 
accomplished aught, must accomplish it under the pressure 
of continual bodily toil, nay, of penury and desponding 
apprehension of the worst evils, and with no furtherance 
but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man's hut, and the 
rhymes of a Eerguson or Ramsay for his standard of beauty, 
he sinks not under all these impediments : through the fogs 
and darkness of that obscure region, his lynx eye discerns 
the true relations of the world and human life ; he grows 
into intellectual strength, and trains himself into intellectual 
expertness. Impelled by the expansive movement of his 
own irrepressible soul, he struggles forward into the general 
view ; and with haughty modesty lays down before us, as 
the fruit of his labor, a gift which Time has now pro- 
nounced imperishable. Add to all this, that his darksome 
drudging childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era 
of his whole life; and that he died in his thirty-seventh 
year : and then ask, If it be strange that his poems are im- 
perfect^ and of small -extent, or that his genius attained no 
mastery in its art ? Alas, Itis Sun shone as through a tropi- 



Essay on Burns. 7 

cal tornado ; and the pale Shadow of Death eclipsed it at 
noon! Shrouded in such baleful vapors, the genius of 
Burns was never seen in clear azure splendor, enlightening 
the world: but some beams from it did, by tits, pierce 
through ; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient 
colors, into a glory and stern grandeur, which men silently 
gazed on with wonder and tears 1 

' We are anxious not to exaggerate; for it is exposition 
rather than admiration that our readers require of us here ; 
and yet to avoid some tendency to thitt side is no easy 
matter. We love Burns, and we pity him ; and love and 
pity are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes 
thought, should be a cold business ; we^ar^'-netu^o sure of 
this ; but, at all events, our ^©ncern with Burns is not ex- 
clusively that of critics. True and genial as his poetry 
must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that 
he interests and affects us. He was often advised to write 
a tragedy : time and means were not lent him for this ; but 
through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. 
We question whether the world has since witnessed so 
utterly sad a scene; whether Napoleon himself, left to 
brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock, ' amid 
the melancholy maih,' presented to the reflecting mind such 
a ^spectacle of pity and fear' as did this intrinsically 
nobler, gentler, and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away 
in a hopeless struggle with base entanglements, which coiled 
closer and closer round him, till only death opened him an 
outlet. Conquerors are a class of men with whom, for most 
part, the world could well dispense ; nor can the hard 
intellect, the unsympathizing loftiness, and high but selfish 
enthusiasm of such persons inspire us in general with any 
affection ; at best it may excite amazement ; and their fall, 
like that of a pyramid, will l^e beheld with a certain sadness 
and awe. But a- true Poet, a man'in'.ipiose heart resides 
some effluence of Wisdom, som« tone" 61/ th§;'^. Eternal Mel- 



S Carlyle. 

odies/ is the most precious gift that can be bestowed on a 
generation: we see in him a freer, purer development of 
whatever is noblest in ourselves ; his life is a rich lesson to 
us ; and we mourn his death as that of a benefactor who j 
loved and taught us. 

Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on us in 
Robert Burns ; but with queenlike indifference she cast it 
from her hand, like a thing of no moment; and it was 
defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, before we rec- 
ognized it. To the ill-starred Burns was given the power of 
making man's life more venerable, but that of wisely guid- 
ing his own life was not given. Destiny, — for so in our 
ignorance we must speak, — his faults, the faults of others, ,1 
proved too hard for him;* and that spirit which might have 
soared could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its 
glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom; and 
died, we may almost say, without ever having lived. And i 
so kind and warm a soul ; so full of inborn riches, of love to 
all living and lifeless things ! How his heart flows out in 
sympathy over universal Nature ; and in her bleakest prov- 
inces discerns a beauty and a meaning ! The ' Daisy ' falls 
not unheeded under his ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of 
that ^wee, cowering, timorous beastie,' cast forth, after all 
its provident pains, to Hhole the sleety dribble and cran- 
reuch cauld.' The ^ hoar visage ' of Winter delights him ; 
he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness in these 
scenes of solemn desolation ; but the voice of the tempest 
becomes an anthem to his ears ; he loves to walk in the 
sounding woods, for 4t raises his thoughts to Him that 
walketh on the imngs of the wind.'' ^ true Poet-soul, for it 
needs but to be struck, and the sound it yields will be 
musicjj But observe him chiefly as he mingles with his 
brother men. What warm, all-comprehending fellow-feel- 
ing ; what trustful, boundless love ; what generous exagger- 
ation of the object loved ! His rustic friend, his nut-brown 



Essay on Burns. 9 

maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a 
queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. The 
rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any Arca- 
dian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the smoke 
and soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely to him : 
Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love also, and Cour- 
age ; the simple feelings, the worth, the nobleness, that 
dwell under the straw roof, are dear and venerable to his 
heart : and thus over the lowest provinces of man's existence 
he pours the glory of his own soul; and they rise, in 
shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened into a beauty 
which other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just 
self-consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride ; 
yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for offence ; no cold 
suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one. The Peasant 
Poet bears himself, we might say, like a King in exile : he 
is cast among the low, and feels himself equal to the 
highest , yet he claims no rank, that none may be disputed 
to him. Tlie forward he can repel, the supercilious he can 
subdue ; pretensions of wealth or ancestry are of no avail 
with him ; there is a fire in that dark eye, under which the 
'insolence of condescension' cannot thrive. In his abase- 
ment, in his extreme need, he forgets not for a moment the 
majesty of Poetry and Manhood. And yet, far as he feels 
himself above common men, he wanders not apart from 
them, but mixes warmly in their interests; nay, throws 
himself into their arms, and, as it were, entreats them to 
love him. It is moving to see how, in his darkest despond- 
ency, this proud being still seeks relief from friendship; 
unbosoms himself, often to the unworthy; and, amid tears, 
strains to his glowing heart a heart that knows only the 
name of friendship. And yet he was ' quick to learn ; ' a 
^man of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded 
DO concealment. His understanding saw through the hol- 
lowness even of accomplished deceivers; but there was a 



lo Carlyle. ' / 

generous credulity in his heart. And so did our Peasant 
show himself among us; 'a soul like an ^olian harp, in 
whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, 
changed itself into articulate melody.' And this was he 
for whom the world found no fitter business than quarrel- 
ing with smugglers and vintners, computing excise-dues 
upon tallow, and gauging ale-barrels ! In such toils was 
that mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted: and a hundred 
years may pass on, before another such is given us to waste. 

^ All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, seem 
to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated 
fraction of what was in him ; brief, broken glimpses of a 
genius that could never show itself complete ; that wanted 
all things for completeness : culture, leisure, true effort, nay, 
\ even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely any ex- 
T^ijeption, mere occasional effusions ; poured forth with little 
'^m^itation; expressing, by such means as offered, the pas- 
Y^ sion, opinion, or humor of the hour. Never in one instance 
Y" was it permitted him to grapple with any subject with the 
" 1 full collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the 
concentrated fire of his genius. To try by the strict rules 
• of Art such imperfect fragments, would be at once unprofit- 
i able and unfair. Nevertheless, there is something in these 
poems, marred and defective as they are, which forbids the 
i most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by. Some 
\ sort of enduring quality they must have: for after fifty 
years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still 
continue to be read ; nay, are read more and more eagerly, 
more and more extensively ; and this not only by literary 
virtuosos, and that class upon whom transitory causes oper- 
ate most strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard, 
unlettered, and truly natural class, who read little, and espe- 
cially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. The 
grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which extends, 



Essay on Burns. 1 1 

in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and ovei- all 
regions where the English tongue is spoken, are well worth 
inquiring into. After every just deduction, it seems to 
imply some rare excellence in these works. What is that 
excellence ? 

I To answer this question will not lead us far. The excel- 
lence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry 
or prose ; but, at the same time, it is plain and easily recog- 
nized: his Sincerity, his indisputable air of Trutlu Here 
are no fabulous woes or joys ; no hollow fantastic sentimen- 
talities ; no wiredrawn relinings, either in thought or feel- 
ing: the passion that is traced before us has glowed in a 
living heart; the opinion he utters has risen in his own 
understanding, and been a light to his own steps. He does 
not write from hearsay, but from si ght and ^ ^x ^erience : it 
is the scenes that he has lived and Kbored amidst,~tEat he 
describes : those scenes, rude and humble as they are, have 
kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, noble thoughts, and 
definite resolves ; and he speaks forth what is in him, not 
from any outward call of vanity or interest, but because his 
heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it with such mel- 
ody and modulation as he can; ' ip. homely rustic jingle;' 
but it is his own, and genuine. ^This is the grand secret ^ 
for finding readers and retaining them : let him who would 
move and convince others, be first moved and convinced 
himselfi^ Horace's rule. Si vis me Jlere, is applicable in a 
wider sense than the literal one. rTo e very poet, to every 
writer, we might say: Be true, if you would be believed. 
jKet _a Joan^but^^peak forth with genuine earnestness the 
'rrK^ught, the emotion, the actual condition of his own hearTp^^ 
and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the 
tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In cult- 
ure, in extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or 
below him ; but in Either case, his words, if they are earnest 
and sincere, will find some response within us ; for in spite 



12 Carlyle. 

of all casual varieties in outward rank or inward, as face 
answers to face, so does the heart of man to man.^ J 

5^ This may appear a very simple principle, and one which 
Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the discovery 
is easy enough :[_but the practical appliance is not easy?; is 
indeed the fundamental difficulty which all poets have to 
strive with, and which scarcely one in the hundred ever 
fairly surmounts, (^ ^head too d ull to discriminate the true 
from the false 5 a heart too dull to love the one at all risks, 
and to hate the othei; in spite of all temptations, are alike 
fatal to a writer. 'With either, or, as more commonly hap- 
pens, with both of these deficiencies, combine a love of dis- 
tinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom wanting ; and 
we have Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, its elder 
brother, is of morals|^ How often does the one and the other 
front us, in poetry, as in life ! Great poets themselves are 
not always free of this vice ; nay, it is precisely on a cer- 
tain sort and degree of greatness that it is most commonly 
ingrafted. A strong effort after excellence will sometimes 
solace itself with a mere shadow of success; he who has 
much to unfold, will sometimes unfold it imperfectly. By- 
ron, for instance, was no common man : yet if we examine 
his poetry with this view, we shall find it far enough from 
ifaultless. Generally speaking, we should say that it is not 
true. He refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but \ 
too often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to 
the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are 
his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real men ; we mean, 
poetically consistent and conceivable men ? Do not these 
characters, does not the character of their author, which 
more or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing 
put on for the occasion; no natural or possible mode of 
being, but something intended to look much grander than 
nature? Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic 
heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with 



Essay on Burns. 13 

so much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous ^ 
humor, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry 
tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a 
man in the business of life, which is to last threescore and 
ten years. To our minds there is a taint of this sort, some- 
thing which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in every 
cne of these otherwise so powerful pieces. Perhaps Don 
Juan, especially the latter parts of it, is the only thing 
approaching to a sincere work, he ever wrote ; the only work 
where he showed himself, in any measure, as he was ; and 
seemed so intent on his subject as, for moments, to forget 
himself. Yet Byron hated this vice; we believe, heartily 
detested it : nay, he had declared formal war against it in 
words. So difficult is it even for the strongest to make this 
primary attainment, which might seem the simplest of all: 
to read its own consciousness without mistakes, without errors 
involuntary or wilful ! We recollect no poet of Burns's 
susceptibility who comes before us from the first, and abides 
with us to the last, with such a total want of affectation. 
He is an honest man, and an honest writer. In his suc- 
cesses and his failures, in his greatness and his littleness, he 
is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no lustre but 
his own. We reckon this to be a great virtue ; to be, in fact, ^ 
the root of most other virtues, literary as well as moral. //\ ~ 
J Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of Burns 
that we now allude ; to those writings which he had time to 
meditate, and where no special reason existed to warp his 
critical feeling, or obstruct his endeavor to fulfil it. Certain 
of his Letters, and other fractions of prose composition, by 
no means deserve this praise. Here, doubtless, there is not 
the same natural truth of style ; but on the contrary, some- 
thing not only stiff, but strained and twisted ; a certain high- 
flown inflated tone ; the stilting emphasis of which contrasts 
ill with the firmness and rugged simplicity of even his poor- 
est verses. Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether 



14 Carlyle. 

unaffected. Does not Shakspeare himself sometimes pre- 
meditate the sheerest bombast! But even with regard to 
these Letters of Burns, it is but fair to state that he had 
two excuses. The first was his comparative deficiency in 
language. Burns, though for most part he writes with 
singular force, and even gracefulness, is not master of Eng- 
glish prose, as he is of Scottish verse ; not master of it, we 
mean, in proportion to the depth and vehemence of his >; 
matter. These Letters strike us as the effort of a man to > 
express something which he has no organ fit for expressing. 
But a second and weightier excuse is to be found in the 
peculiarity of Burns's social rank. His correspondents are 
often men whose relation to him he has never accurately 
ascertained; whom therefore he is either forearming him- 
self against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting: 
the style he thinks will please them. At all events, we 
should remember that these faults, even in his Letters, are 
not the rule, but the exception. Whenever he writes, as; 
, one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends and on real I 
V interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, expressive, , 
v \^ometimes even beautiful. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop are) 
^ uniformly excellent. \^ 

1^ Ifeut we return to his Poetry. In addition to its Sincerity, , 
it has another peculiar merit, which indeed is but a mode,, 
V j or perhaps a means, of the foregoing : this displa ys itself ini 
j^ jhis choice of subjects; or rather in his indifference as td 
/ * suB]ecis,"'ancl tiie power he has of making all subjects inter- 
esting. The ordinary poet, like the ordinary man, is forever 
seeking in external circumstances the help which can be 
found only in himself. In what is familiar and near at hand, 
he discerns no form or comeliness : home is not poetical, but 
prosaic ; it is in some past, distant, conventional heroic 
world, that poetry resides for him; were he there and not 
here, were he thus and not so, it would be well with him. 
Hence our innumerable host of rose-colored Novels and iron- 



tjssav on Burns. ic 

^. 

mailed Epics, with their locality not on the earth, but some- 
yrhere nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun, 
and our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, 
and copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, and so many other 
truculent figures from the heroic times or the heroic cli- 
mates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be 
with them ! But yet, as a great moralist proposed preaching 
to the men of this century, so Avould we fain preach to the 
poe'ts, 'a sermon on the duty of staying at home.' Let them 
be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little for 
them. That form of life has attraction for us, less because 
it is better or nobler than our own, than simply because it is 
different ; and even this attraction must be of the most tran- 
sient sort. For will not our own age, one day, be an ancient 
one; and have as quaint a costume as the rest; not con- 
trasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them, 
in respect of quaintness? Does Homer interest us now^ 
because he wrote of what passed beyond his native Greece, 
and two centuries before he was born ; or because he wrotes 
what passed in God's world, and in the heart of man, which 
is the same after thirty centuries ?/ Let our poets look t 
this : is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision\ 
deeper than that of other men, — they have nothing to fear, 
even from the humblest subject; isj it not so, — they have 
nothing to hope, but an epnemli'al favor, even from the 
highest. 

J* The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for a 
subject: the elements of his art are in him, and around him 
on every hand ; for him the Ideal world is not remote from 
the Actual, but under it and within it : nay, he is a poet, pre- 
cisely because he can discern it there. Wherever there is a 
sky above him, and a world around him, the poet is in his 
place ; for here too is man's existence, with its infinite long- 
ings and small acquirings ; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed 
endeavors ; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes 



•A 



1 6 Carlyle. 

that wander through Eternity ; and all the mystery of 
brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any 
age or climate, since man first began to live. Is there not 
the fifth act of a Tragedy in every death-bed, though it were 
a peasant's, and a bed of heath ? And are wooings and \ 
weddings obsolete, that there can be Comedy no longer? 
Or are men suddenly grown wise, that Laughter must no 
longer shake his sides, but be cheated of his Farce ? Man's ; 
life and nature is as it was, and as it will ever be. But the 
poet must have an eye to read these things, and a heart to 
understand them ; or they come and pass away before him 
in vain. He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision has been 
given him. Has life no meanings for him which another 1 
cannot equally decipher ; then he is no poet, and Delphi 
itself will not make him one. 
1 1> . In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a i 
great poet, better manifests his capability, better proves the 
truth of his genius, than if he had by his own strength kept ; 
the whole Minerva Press going, to the end of his literary 
course. (He shows himself at least a poet of Nature's own r 
making; and^ Nature, after all, is still th^, ^rand agent in 
making poets. i we often" hear bf this and the' other external 
condition being requisite for the existence of a poet. Some- - 
times it is a certain sort of training ; he must have studied 
certain things, studied for instance ' the elder dramatists,' ■ 
and so learned a poetic language ; as if poetry lay in the 
tongue, not in the heart. At other times we are told he 
must be bred in a certain, rank, and must be on a confiden- 
tial footing with the higher classes ; because, above all 
things, he must see the world. As to seeing the world, we 
apprehend this will cause him little difficulty, if he have 
but eyesight to see it with. Without eyesight, indeed, the 
task might be hard. The blind or the purblind man ' tra- 
vels from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all barren.' But 
happily every poet is born in the world ; and sees it, with 



Fssay on Burns. 17 

)r against his will, every day and every hour he lives. The 
nysterious workmanship of man's heart, the true light and 
:he inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal themselves 
lot only in capital cities and crowded saloons, but in every 
lut and hamlet where men have their abode. Nay, do not 
}he elements of all human virtues and all human vices ; the 
passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, 
n stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of every 
ndividual bosom that has practised honest self-examina- 
:ion ? Truly, this same world may be seen in Mossgiel and 
larbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it ever came to 
light in Crockford's, or the Tuileries itself. 

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the 
poor aspirant to poetry; for it is hinted that he should 
have been born two centuries ago ; inasmuch as poetry, 
about that date, vanished from the earth, and became no 
longer attainable by men ! Such cobweb speculations have, 
Qow and then, overhung the field of literature ; but they 
Dbstruct not the growth of any plant there : the Shakspeare 
3r the Burns, unconsciously, and merely as he walks on- 
ward, silently brushes them away. Is not every genius an 
impossibility till he appear ? Why do we call him new 
and original, if ive saw where his marble was lying, and 
what fabric he could rear from it ? It is not the material, 
but the workman that is wanting. It is not the dark i^lace 
that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish peasant's life 
was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became 
a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it a man^s life, and 
therefore significant to men. A thousand battle-fields 
remain unsung ; but the Wounded Hare has not perished 
without its memorial ; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us 
from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our 
Halloiveen had passed and repassed, in rude awe and 
laughter, since the era of the Druids ; but no Theocritus, 
till Burns, discerned in it the materials of a Scottish Idyl : 






1 8 Carlyle. 1 

neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent or Roman 
Jubilee; but nevertheless Superstitioyi and Hypocrisy and 
Fun having been propitious to hiin, in this man's hand it 
became a poem, instinct with satire and genuine comic life. 
Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat it, place himi 
£vvhere and how you will ; and true poetry will not be wanting. , 
Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as we 
have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged sterling 
worth pervades whatever Burns has written ; a virtue, as of ' 
green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry ; it : 
is redolent of natural life and hardy natural men. There is i 
a decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet native graceful- 
ness : he is tender, he is vehement, yet without constraint : 
or too visible effort ; he melts the heart, or inflames it, with i 
a power which seems habitual and familiar to him. We see 
that in this man there was the gentleness, the trembling pity 
of a woman, with the deep earnestness, the force and pas- 
sionate ardor of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming : 
fire ; as lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. , 
He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of human i 
feeling ; the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the > 
joyful, are welcome in their turns to his 'lightly-moved audi 
all-conceiving spirit.' And observe with what a fierce^ 
prompt force he grasps his subject, be it what it may ! How 
he fixes, as it were, the full image of the matter in his eye ; ; 
y full and clear in every lineament ; and catches the real type ' 
*N^ ^nd essence of it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial 1 
>NN£ircumstances, no one of which misleads himl^ Is it of 
^•eason; some truth to be discovered ? TToTsopliistry, no 
^ vain surface-logic detains him ; quick, resolute, unerring, he 
^ J pierces through into the marrow of the question ; and speaks 
,^; his verdict with an emphasis that cannot be forgotten. Is 
>I it of description ; some visual object to be represented ? No 
poet of any age or nation is more graphic than Burns : the 
characteristic features disclose themselves to him at a glance ; 



7\ 



Kssay on Burns. 19 

three lines from his hand, and we have a likeness. And, in 
that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward metre, so^ 
clear and dehnite a likeness ! C It seems a draughtsman'^^^'^ 
working with a burnt stick ; and yet the burin of a lietzsch 
is not more expressive or exact. | 

Of this last excellence, the plmnest and most comprehen- 
sive of all, being indeed the root and foundation of every 
sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, we could produce 
innumerable instances from the writings of Burns. Take 
these glimpses of a snow-storm from his Winter Night (the 
italics are ours) : 

When biting Boreas, fell and dour, 
Shai-p shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 
And Phcebus gies a short-liv\l glowr 

Fa)' south the lift, 
Dim-dark'' ning thro' the flaky show'' 

Or whirling drift : 

'Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
Poor labor sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
While burns ici'' snawy wreeths upchok'd 

Wild-eddying swirl, 
Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd 

Down headlong hurl. 

Are there not ^descriptive touches' here? The describer 
saw this thing; the essential feature and true likeness of 
every circumstance in it ; saw, and not with the eye only. 
Poor labor locked in sweet sleep ; ' the dead stillness of 
man, unconscious, vanquished, yet not unprotected, while 
such strife of the material elements rages, and seems to 
reign supreme in loneliness : this is of the heart as well- as 
of the eye ! — Look also at his image of a thaw, and prophe- 
sied fall of the Aukl Brig : 

Wlien heavy, dark, continued, a' -day rains 

Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains ; 

When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, 

Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains 6oi7, 



20 Carlyle. 

Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, 
Or haunted Garpal* draws his feeble source, 
Arous'd by blust'ring winds and spotting thowes, 
In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes ; 
While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat, 
Sweeps dams and mills and brigs «' to the gate ; 
And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey, 
Auld Ayr is just one lengthen' d tumbling sea ; 
Then down ye' 11 hurl, Deil nor ye never rise ! 
And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring skies. 

The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that Deluge ! 
The welkin has, as it were, bent down with its weight ; the 
^gumlie jaups' and the ^pouring skies' are mingled together i 
it is a world of rain and ruin. — In respect of mere clear] 
ness and minute fidelity, the Farmers commendation of hi| 
Auld Mare, in plough or in cart, may vie with Homer'^ 
Smithy of the Cyclops, or yoking of Priam's Chariot. Nor 
have we forgotten stout Burn-the-wind and his brawny cus- 
tomers, inspired by Scotch Drink: but it is needless to 
multiply examples. One other trait of a much finer sort we 
select from multitudes of such among his Songs. It gives, 
in a single line, to the saddest feeling the saddest environ- 
ment and local habitation : 



I 



The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave. 
And Time is setting wV me, ; 

e Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell ! 
I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, 0. 
s clearness of sight we have called the foundation o 
ex .^.ent; for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall 
we know how to place or prize it, in our understanding, 
our imagination, our affections? Yet it is not in itself,^ 
perhaps, a very high excellence; but capable of being! 
united indifferently with the strongest, or with ordinary 
power. Homer surpasses all men in this quality: but 
strangely enough, at no great distance below him are Eich- 
*i^'a6M?o.sits Hydaspes! 



Essay on Burns. (21 



ardsou and Defoe. It belongs, in truth, to what is called a 
lively mind; and gives no sure indication of the higher 
endowments that may exist along with it. In all the three 
cases we have mentioned, it is combined with great gar- 
rulity; their descriptions are detailed, ample and lovingly 
exact; Homer's fire bursts through, from time to time, as 
if by accident; but Defoe and Richardson have no fire. 
Burns, again, is not more distinguished by the clearness 
than by the impetuous force of his conceptions. Of the 
strength, the piercing emphasis with which he thought, his 
emphasis of expression may give a humble but the readiest 
proof. Who ever uttered sharper sayings than his ; words 
more memorable, now by their burning vehemence, now by 
their cool vigor and laconic pith? A single phrase depicts 
a whole subject, a whole scene. We hear of 'a gentleman 
that derived his patent of nobility direct from Almighty 
God.' Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field struggled 
forward, he says, ^red-ivat-shod :' giving in this one word, 
a full vision of horror and carnage ; perhaps too frightfully 
accurate for Art! 

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns 
is this vigor of his strictly intellectual perceptions. A 
resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, and in his 
feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says of him, i 
with some surprise: 'All the faculties of Burns's mind 
were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his 
predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own 
enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius . 
exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From \ 
his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted 
to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to 
exert his abilities.' But this, if we mistake not, is at all 
times the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. 
Poetry, except in such cases as that of/Keats, where they 
whole consists in extreme sensibili^yy^d a certain vague, -^ 



22 Carlyli 



pervading tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty, no 
organ which can be superadded to the rest, or disjoined from 
them ; but rather the result of their general harmony and 
completion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist in the Poet 
are those that exist, with more or less development, in 
every human soul : the imagination which shudders at the 
Hell of Dante, is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which 
called that picture into being. How does the Poet speak 
to men, with power, but by being still more a man than 
they? Shakspeare, it has been well observed, in the plan- 
ning and completing of his tragedies, has shown an Under- 
standing, were it nothing more, which might have governed 
states, or indited a Novmn Organum. What Burns's force 
of understanding may have been, we have less means of 
judging : it had to dwell among the humblest objects ; never 
saw Philosophy; never rose, except by natural effort and 
for short intervals, into the region of great ideas. Never- 
theless, sufficient indication, if no proof sufficient, remains 
for us in his works : we discern the brawny movements of 
a gigantic though untutored strength ; and can understand 
how, in conversation, his quick sure insight into men and 
things may, as much as aught else about him, have amazed 
the best thinkers of his time and country. 
22, But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is 
fine as well as strong. The more delicate relations of 
things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were 
intimately present to his heart. The logic of the senate 
and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient; nay, 
perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the most cer- 
tainly elude it. Por this logic works by words, and 'the 
highest,' it has been said, 'cannot be expressed in words.' 
We are not without tokens of an openness for this higher 
truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for it, 
having existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remem- 
bered, 'wonders,' in the passage above quoted, that Burns 



^ Essay on Burns. 23 

had formed some distinct conception of the 'doctrine of 
association.' We rather think that far subtler things than 
the doctrine of association had from of old been familiar to 
him. Here for instance: 

'We know nothing,' thus writes he, 'or next to nothing, of the 
structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seeming caprices 
in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or 
struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no ex- 
traordinary impression. I have some favorite flowers in spring, among 
■which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild- 
brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view 
and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud solitary 
whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence 
of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling an 
elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, 
my dear friend, to what can this be owing ? Are we a piece of ma- 
chinery, which, like the ^olian harp, passive, takes the impression of 
the passing accident ; or do these workings argue something within us 
above the trodden clod ? I own myself partial to such proofs of those 
awful and important realities : a God that made all things, man's im- 
material and immortal nature, and a world of weal or w^oe beyond 
death and the grave.' 

J Eacce and fineness of understanding are often spoken of 
as something different from general force and fineness of 
nature, as something partly independent of them. The 
necessities of language so require it; but in truth these 
qualities are not distinct and independent : except in special 
3ases, and from special causes, they ever go together. A 
man of strong understanding is generally a man of strong 
3haracter; neither is delicacy in the one kind often divided 
From delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, is igno- 
rant that in the Poetry of Burns keenness of insight keeps 
pace with keenness of feeling; that his light is not more 
pervading than his warmth. He is a man of the most 
impassioned temper; with passions not strong only, but 
loble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great 
poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is love towards 



24 



Carlyle. "^ 



all Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its 
beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. 
\ There is a true old saying, that 'Love furthers knowledge: ' 
?[ but above all, it is the living essence of that knowledge 
^ which makes poets; the first principle of its existence, 
^ 'increase, activity. Of Burns 's fervid affection, his gener- 
ous all-embracing Love, we have spoken already, as of the 
grand distinction of his nature, seen equally in word and 
deed, in his Life and in his Writings. It were easy to 
multiply examples. Not man only, but all that environs 
man in the material and moral universe, is lovely in his 
sight: 'the hoary hawthorn,' the Hroop of gray plover,' 
the 'solitary curlew,' all are dear to him; all live in this 
Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious 
brotherhood. How touching is it, for instance, that, amidst 
the gloom of personal misery, brooding ove°r the wintry 
desolation without him and within him, he thinks of the 
' ourie cattle ' and ' silly sheep,' and their sufferings in the 
pitiless storm! 

I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war. 
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur. 
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 
That in the merry months o' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing. 

What comes o' thee ? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 

And close thy ee ? 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its 'ragged roof and 
chinky wall, ' has a heart to pity even these ! This is worth 
several homilies on Mercy; for it is the voice of Mercy 
herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy ; his soul rushes 
forth into all realms of being; nothing that has existence 



Essay on Burns. 25 

can be indifferent to him. The very Devil he cannot hate 
with right orthodoxy: 

But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 
O, wad ye tak a thought and men' ! 
Ye aiblins might, — I dinna ken, — 

Still hae a stake ; 
I'm vvae to think upo' yon den, 

Even for your sake ! 

He did not know, probably, that Sterne had been before- 
hand with him. '"He is the father of curses and lies," 
said Dr. Slop; "and is cursed and damned already." — "I 
am sorry for it," quoth my uncle Toby! ' — A Poet without 
Love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility. 
^But has it not been said, in contradiction to this prin- 
^ciple, that 'Indignation makes verses'? It has been so 
said, and is true enough : but the contradiction is apparent, 
not real. The Indignation which makes verses is, properly 
speaking, an inverted Love; the love of some right, some 
worth, some goodness, belonging to ourselves or others, 
which has been injured, and which this tempestuous feel- 
ing issues forth to defend and avenge. No selfish fury of 
heart, existing there as a primary feeling, and without its 
opposite, ever produced much Poetry: otherwise, we sup- 
pose, the Tiger were the most musical of all our choristers. 
Johnson said he loved a good hater; by which he must 
have meant, not so much one that hated violently, as one 
that hated wisely; hated baseness from love of nobleness. 
However, in spite of .Johnson's paradox, tolerable enough 
for once in speech, but which need not have been so often 
adopted in print since then, we rather believe that good 
men deal sparingly in hatred, either wise or unwise : nay, 
that a 'good ' hater is still a desideratum in this world. 
The Devil, at least, who passes for the chief and best of 
tljat class, is said to be nowise an amiable character, i 
r-Oi the verses which Indignation makes, Burns has also 



26 Carlyle. 

given us specimens: and among the best that were evei 
given. Who will forget his ^Dweller in yon Dungeon dark; ' 
a piece that might have been chanted by the Furies of 
^schylus? The secrets of the infernal Pit are laid bare; 
a boundless, baleful 'darkness visible;' and streaks of hell- 
fire quivering madly in its black haggard bosom! 

Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 
Hangman of Creation, mark ! 
Who in widow's weeds appears, 
Laden with unhonored years, 
Noosing with care a bursting purse. 
Baited with many a deadly curse ! 

>/G"Why should we speak of 'Scots wha hae icV Wallace hied; ' 
since all know of it, from the king to the meanest of his 
subjects? This dithyrambic Avas composed on horseback; 
in riding in the middle of tempests, over the wildest Gallo- 
way moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing 
the poet's looks, forbore to speak, — judiciously enough, 
for a man composing Bruce's Address might be unsafe to 
trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, 
as he formed it, through the soul of Burns: but to the 
external ear, it should be sung with the throat of the whirl- 
wind. So long as there is warm blood in the heart of 
Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this 
war-ode; the best, we believe, that was ever written by 
any pen. 

7 *T Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our ear and 
'mind with a strange tenacity, is Macpherson's Farewell. 
Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself that 
cooperates. Por was not this grim Celt, this shaggy 
Northland Cacus, that 'lived a life of sturt and strife, and 
died by treacherie, ' — was not he too one of the Nimrod? 
and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own remote 
misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one? Nay, 
was there not a touch of grace given him? A fibre of love 



( 



Essay on Burns. 27 

and softness, of poetry itself, must liave lived in his savage 
heart: for he composed that air the night before his exe- 
cution; on the wings of that poor melody his better soul 
would soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the ignominy 
and despair, which, like an avalanche, was hurling him to 
the abyss! Here also, as at Thebes, and in Pelops' line, 
was material Tate matched against man's Free-will; 
matched in bitterest though obscure duel; and the ethe- 
real soul sank not, even in its blindness, without a cry 
which has survived it. But who, except Burns, could have 
given words to such a soul; words that we never listen to 
without a strange half -barbarous, half -poetic fellow-feeling? 

Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaecl he; 
He play'' d a spring, and danced it round, 

Below the gallows-tree. 

Under a lighter disguise, tlie same principle of Love, 
which we have recognized as the great characteristic of 
Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally manifests itself 
in the shape of Humor. Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny 
moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth rolls through the mind 
of Burns; he rises to the high, and stoops to the low, and 
is brother and playmate to all Nature. We speak not of 
his bold and often irresistible faculty of caricature; for 
this is Drollery rather than Humor: but a much tenderer 
sportfulness dwells in him; and comes forth here and 
there, in evanescent and beautiful touches; as in his 
Address to the Mouse, or the Farmer^ s Mare, or in his Elegy 
071 poor Mailie, which last may be reckoned his happiest 
effort of this kind. In these pieces there are traits of a 
Humor as fine as that of Sterne ; yet altogether different, 
original, peculiar, — the Humor of Burns. 
J ^f the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other 
kindred qualities of Burns's Poetry, much more might be 
said: but now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we 



28 Carly 



e. 



must prepare to quit this part of our subject. To speak of 
his individual Writings, adequately and with any detail, 
would lead us far beyond our limits. As already hinted, 
we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical 
language, deserving the name of Poems : they are rhymed 
eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense ; yet seldom 
essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. Tam o' Slianter 
itself, which enjoys so high a favor, does not appear .to us 
at all decisively to come under this last category. It is 
not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ) the 
heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead. He 
has not gone back, much less carried us back, into that 
dark, earnest, wondering age, when the tradition was 
believed, and when it took its rise ; he does not attempt, 
by any new-modeling of his supernatural ware, to strike 
anew that deep, mysterious chord of human nature, which 
once responded to such things ; and which lives in us too, 
and will forever live, though silent now, or vibrating with 
far other notes, and to far different issues. Our German 
readers will understand us, when we say that he is not the 
Tieck but the Musaus of this tale. Externally it is all 
green and living; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but 
only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly cohere : 
the strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imagina- 
tions between the Ayr public-house and the gate of Tophet, 
is nowhere bridged over, nay, the idea of such a bridge is 
laughed at ; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes 
a mere drunken phantasmagoria, or many-colored spectrum 
painted on ale-vapors, and the Farce alone has any reality. 
We do not say that Burns should have made much more of 
this tradition; Ave rather think that, for strictly poetical 
purposes, not much loas to be made of it. Neither ar(? 
we blind to the deep, varied, genial power displayed in 
what he has actually accomplished ; but we find far more 
'Shakspearean ' qualities, as these of Tarn o' Slianter have 



Essay on Burns. 29 

been fondly named, in many of liis other pieces; nay, we 
incline to believe that this latter might have been written, 
all but quite as well, by a man who, in place of genius, 
had only possessed talent. 

' Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly 
poetical of all his 'poems ' is one which does not appear in 
Currie's Edition; but has been often printed before and 
since, under the humble title of The Jolly Beggars. The 
subject truly is among the lowest in Nature; but it only 
the more shows our Poet's gift in raising it into the domain 
of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly com- 
pacted; melted together, refined; and poured forth in one 
flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, soft of 
movement; yet sharp and precise in its details; every face 
is a portrait : that raude carlin, that icee Ajjollo, that Son 
of Mars, are Scottish, yet ideal; the scene is at once a 
dream, and the very Kagcastle of 'Poosie-Nansie. ' Farther, 
it seems in a considerable degree complete, a real self- 
supporting Whole, which is the highest merib in a poem. 
The blanket of the Night is drawn asunder for a moment; 
in full, ruddy, flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions 
are seen in their boisterous revel; for the strong pulse of 
Life vindicates its right to gladness even here; and when 
the curtain closes, we prolong the action, without effort; 
the next day as the last, our Caird and our Balladmonger 
ire singing and soldiering; their *brats and callets ' are 
hawking, begging, cheating; and some other night, in new 
ombinations, they will wring from Pate another hour of 
kvassail and good cheer. Apart from the universal sym- 
pathy with man which this again bespeaks in Burns, a 
genuine inspiration and no inconsiderable technical talent 
ue manifested liere. There is the fidelity, humor, warm 
ife^ and accurate painting and grouping of some Teniers, 
'or whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not without 
significance. It would be strange, doubtless, to call this 



30 Carlyle. 

the best of Burns's writings: we mean to say only that it 
seems to us the most perfect of its kind, as a piece of 
poetical composition, strictly so called. In the Beggars^ 
Opera, in the Beggars' Bush, as other critics have already 
remarked, there is nothing which, in real poetic vigor, 
equals this Cantata; nothing, as we think, which comes 
within many degrees of it. 

^ iBwt by far the most finished, complete, and truly inspired 
pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be found among 
his Songsri It is here that, although through a small aper- 
ture, his light shines with least obstruction; in its highest 
beauty and pure sunny clearness. The reason may be, 
that Song is a brief, simple species of composition; and 
requires nothing so much for its perfection as genuine 
poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. Yet the Song has 
its rules equally with the Tragedy; rules which in most 
cases are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as 
felt. We might write a long essay on the Songs of Burns; 
which we reckon by far the best that Britain has yet pro- 
duced: for indeed, since the era of Queen Elizabeth, we 
know not that, by any other hand, aught truly worth atten- 
tion has been accomplished in this department. True, we 
have songs enough 'by persons of quality; ' we have tawdry, 
hollow, wine-bred madrigals ; many a rhymed speech 'in the 
flowing and watery vein of Ossorius the Portugal Bishop, ' 
rich in sonorous words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps 
with some tint of a sentimental sensuality ; all which many 
persons cease not from, endeavoring to sing; though for 
most part, we fear, the music is but from the throat out- 
wards, or at best from some region far enough short of the 
Soul; not in which, but in a certain inane Limbo of the 
Fancy, or even in some vaporous debatable -land on the out- 
skirts of the Nervous System, most of such madrigals and 
rhymed speeches seem to have originated. 



Essay on Burns. oj 

7 With the Songs of Burns we must not name these things 
Independently of the clear, manly, heartfelt sentiment that 
ever pervades his poetry, his. Songs are honest in another 
point of view: in form, as well as inspirit. They do not 
afect to be set to music, but they actually and in themselves 
aro music; they have received their life, and fashioned 
tlK^mselves together, in the medium of Harmony, as Venus 
ros'e from the bosom of the sea. The story, the feeling is 
noi: detailed, but suggested; not said, or spouted, in rhetor- 
ical completeness and coherence; but sung, in fitful gushes, 
in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warhlings not of the 
voice only, but of the whole mind. We consider this to be 
the essence of a song; and that no songs since the little 
careless catches, and as it were drops of song, which Shak- 
speare has here and there sprinkled over his Plays, fulfill 
this condition in nearly the same degree as most of Burns's 
io. Such grace and truth of external movement, too, pre- 
supposes in general a corresponding force and truth of senti- 
nent and inward meaning. The Songs of Burns are not 
nore perfect m the former quality than in the latter. With 
^hat tenderness he sings, yet with what vehemence and 
mtireness ! There is a piercing wail in his sorrow, the 
mrest rapture in his joy; he burns with the sternest ire or 
aughs with the loudest or sliest mirth ; and yet he is sweet 
imd soft, ^ sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft 
:ts their parting tear.' If we farther take into account the 
jmmenso variety of his subjects ; how, from the loud flowing 
level in ^WiUie brewed a Peck o' Maut; to the stilL rapt 
!nthusia.m of sadness for Mary in Heaven; from the glad 
|.ind greeting of Auld Langsyne, or l^e comic archness of 
Duncan Gray, to the fire-eyed fury of ^ Scots wha hae wf 
miace bled,' he has found a tone and words for every mood 
.f man's heart, — it will seem a small praise if we rank 
-im as the first of all our Song- writers ; for we know not 
/here to find one worthy of being second to him. 



32 Carlyle. 

'^flftt is on Ms Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief influ- 
ence as an author will ultimately be found to depend : nor, 
if our Fletcher's aphorism is true, shall we account this a 
small influence. ' Let me make the songs of a people,' said 
he, ' and you shall 2;|iake its laws.' Surely, if ever any Poet 
might have ecfualejd' himself with Legislators on this ground, 
it was Burns. Hft.''-S/)ngs are. already part of the mother- 
tongue, not of Scotlan'cl*'JsfM^y but of Britain, and of the mil- 
lions that in all ends of the earth speak a British language. 
In hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many-colored 
joy and woe of existence, the name, the voice of that joy 
and that woe, is the name and voice which Burns has given 
them. Strictly speaking, perhaps no British man has so 
deeply affected the thoughts and feelings of so many men, 
as this solitary and altogether private individual, with means 
apparently the humblest. 

' <" In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think 
that Burns's influence may have been considerable: we 
mean, as exerted specially on the Literature of his country, 
at least on the Literature of Scotland, ^mong the great 
changes which British, particularly Scottish, literature has- 
undergone since that period, one of the greatest will be 
found to consist in its remarkable increase of nationality/ 
Even the English writers, most popular in Burns's time, 
were little distinguished for their literary patriotism, in 
this its best sense. f\ certain attenuated cosmopolitan- 
ism had, in good measure, taken place of the old insular 
home-feeling literature was, as it were, without any local 
environment ; was not nourished by the affections which 
spring from a native soil. Oar Grays and Glovers seemed 
to write almost as if wi vacuo; the thing written bears no. 
mark of place ; it is not written so much for Englishmen, as 
for men ; or rather, which is the inevitable result of this, 
for certain Generalizations which philosophy termed men. 
Goldsmith is an exception; not so Johnson; the scene of 
his Rambler is little more English than that of his Easselas. 



Essay on Burns. 33 

/ But if such was, in some degree, tlie case with Eiiglaiul^ 
it was, in the highest degree, the case with Scotland. In 
fact, our Scottish literature had, at that period, a very singu- 
lar aspect ; unexampled, so far as we know, except perhaps 
at Geneva, where the same state of matters appears still to 
continue. For a long period after Scotland became British, 
we had no literature : at the date when Addison and Steele 
were writing their Spectators, our good John Boston was 
writing, with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of 
grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold State of Man. Then 
came the schisms in our National Church, and the fiercer 
schisms in our Body Politic: Theologic ink, and Jacobite 
blood, with gall enough in both cases, seemed to have 
blotted out the intellect of the country : however, it was 
only obscured, not obliterated. <j^Srd Kames made nearly^ 
the first attempt, and a tolerably clumsy one, at writing^ 
English; and ere long, Hume, Robertson, Smith, and a 
whole host of followers, attracted hither the eyes of all 
Europe. And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our 
^fervid genius,' there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing 
indigenous ; except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of 
intellect, which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes 
upbraided with, as a characteristic of our nation. It is 
curious to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had no 
Scottish culture, nor indeed any English ; our culture was 
almost exclusively French. It was by studying Racine and 
Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that Kames had trained 
himself to be a critic and philosopher ; it was the light of 
Montesquieu and Mably that guided Robertson in his polit- 
ical speculations ; Quesnay's lamp that kindled the lamp of 
Adam Smith. Hume was too rich a man to borrow ; and 
perhaps he reacted on the French more than he was acted 
on by them : but neither had he aught to do with Scotland ; 
Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche, was but the lodging and 
laboratory, in which he not so much morally lived, as meta- 



34 Carlyle, 

physically investigated. Never^ perhaps, was there a class 
of writers so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, 
to all appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay, of any 
human affection whatever. The French wits of the period 
were as unpatriotic : but their general deficiency in moral 
principle, not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief 
in all virtue, strictly so called, render this accountable 
enough. We hope there is a patriotism founded on some- 
thing better than prejudice ; that our country may be dear 
to us, without injury to our philosophy ; that in loving and 
justly prizing all other lands, we may prize justly, and yet 
love before all others, our own stern Motherland, and the 
venerable Structure of social and moral Life, which Mind 
has through long ages been building up for us there. Surely 
there is nourishment for the better part of man's heart in 
all this : surely the roots that have fixed themselves in the 
very core of man's being, may be so cultivated as to grow 
up not into briers, but into roses, in the field of his life ! 
Our Scottish sages have no such propensities : the field of 
their life shows neither briers nor roses ; but only a flat, 
continuous thrashing-floor for Logic, whereon all questions, 
from the ^ Doctrine of Rent ' to the ' Natural History of 
Eeligion,' are thrashed and sifted with the same mechanical 
-^impartiality 
^5" With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, it_ 
cannot be demed that inuch of this evil is past, or rapidly 
passing away : our chief literary men, whatever other faults ■ 
they may have, no longer live among us like a Frenclr 
Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Missionaries ; but like 
natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking and sympathizing 
in all our attachments, humors, and habits, ilur litexature_ 
_jio_.longer grows in water but in mould, and with the true 
racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much of this 
change may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it 
jnia^ht be difficult to estimate. Direct literary imitation of 

J 



Essay on Burns. ^S 

Burns was not to be looked for. But his example, in the 
fearless adoption of domestic subjects, could not but operate 
from afar ; and certainly in no heart did the love of country 
ever burn with a warmer glow than in that of Burns : 'a, 
tide of Scottish prejudice,' as he modestly calls this deep 
and generous feeling, ' had been poured along his veins ; 
and he felt that it would boil there till the flood-gates shut 
i_ri^ eternal rest' It seemed to him, as if he could do so little 
for his country, and yet would so gladly have done all. 
One small province stood open for him, — that of Scottish 
Song; and how eagerly he entered on it, how devotedly he 
labored there! In his toilsome journeyings, this object 
never quits him; it is the little happy-valley of his care- 
worn heart. In the gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly 
searches after some lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices 
to snatch one other name from the oblivion that was cov- 
ering it ! These were early feelings, and they abode with 
him to the end : 

... A wish (I mind its power), 
A wish, that to my latest hour 
Shall strongly heave my breast, — 
That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
Some usefu' plan or book could make, 
Or sing a sang at least. 
The rough bur-thistle, spreading wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 
I tum'd my weeding-clips aside, 

And spared the symbol dear. 

^ But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, which 
has already detained us too long. [Far more interesting 
than any of his written works, as it appears to us, are his 
acted ones : the Life he willed and was fated to lead among 
his fellow-menTl These Poems are but like little rhymed 
fragments scattered here and there in the grand unrhymed 
Romance of his earthly existence ; and it is only when in- 



36 Carlyle. 

tercalated in this at their proper places, that they attain 
their full ineasure_^of significance. And this too, alas, was 
but a fragment ! ^ The plan of a mighty edifice had been 
sketched; some columns, porticos, firm masses of building, 
stand completed; the rest more or less clearly indicated; 
with m'any a far-stretching tendency, which only studious 
and friendly eyes can now trace towards the purposed ter- 
mination. , For the work is broken off in the middle, almost 
in the beginning ; and rises among us, beautiful and sad, 
at once unfinished and a ruin ! If charitable judgment was 
necessary in estimating his Poems, and justice required 
that the aim and the manifest power to fulfil it must often 
be accepted for the fulfilment ; much more is this the case 
in regard to his Life, the sum and result of all his endeav- 
ors, where his difficulties came upon him not in detail only, 
but in mass ; and so much has been left unaccomplished, 
nay, was mistaken, and altogether marred. 
J^ "^Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of 
^urns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and man- 
hood, but only youth: for, to the end, we discern no de- 
cisive change in the complexion of his character; in his 
thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were, in youth. With 
all that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating insight, 
and singular maturity of intellectual power, exhibited in 
his writings, he never attains to any clearness regarding 
himself; to the last, he never ascertains his peculiar aim, 
even with such distinctness as is coQimon among ordinary 
men ; and therefore never can pursue it with that single- 
ness of will, which insures success and some contentment 
to such men. To the last, he wavers between two pur- 
poses : glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he yet cannot 
consent to make this his chief and sole glory, and to folloA\' 
it as the one thing needful, through poverty or riches, 
through good or evil report. Another far meaner ambition 
still cleaves to him; he must dream and struggle about a 



i 



Kssav on Bu 



rus. 



37 



certain ^ Rock of Iiidepeiideiice ; ' which, natural and even 
admirable as it might be, was still but a warring with the 
world, on the comparatively insignificant ground of his 
being more completely or less completely supplied with 
money than others; of his standing at a higher or at a 
lower altitude in general estimation than others, tor the 
world still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed 
colors : he expects from it what it cannot give to any man ; 
seeks for contentment, not within himself, in action and 
wise effort, but from without, in the kindness of circum- 
stances, in love, friendship, honor, pecuniary ease. He 
would be happy, not actively and in himself, but passively 
and from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not earned 
by his own labor, but showered on him by the beneficence 
of Destiny. Thus, like a young man, he cannot gird him- 
self up for any worthy well-calculated goal, but swerves 
to and fro, between passionate hope and remorseful disap- 
pointment : rushing onwards with a deep tempestuous force, 
he surmounts or breaks asunder many a barrier; travels, 
nay, advances far, but advancing only under uncertain guid- 
ance, is ever and anon turned from his path; and to the 
last cannot reach the only true happiness of a man, that of 
clear decided Activity in the sphere for which, by nature 

A circumstances, he has been fitted and appointed. 
}! We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns ; nay, 
perhaps, they but interest us the more in his favor. 1 This 
blessing is not given soonest to the best ; but rather, it is 
often the greatest minds that are latest in obtaining it ; 
for where most is to be developed, most time may be re- 
quired to develop it. A complex condition had been as- 
signed him from without; as complex a condition from 
within : no ' preestablished harmony ' existed between the 
clay soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert 
Burns; it was not wonderful that the adjustment between 
them should have been long postponed, and his arm long 



38 Carlyle. 

cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and discordant 
an economy as he had been appointed steward over. Byron 
was, at his death, but a year younger than Burns; and 
through life, as it might have appeared, far more simply 
situated : yet in him too we can trace no such adjustment, 
no such moral manhood ; but at best, and only a little 
before his end, the beginning of what seemed such. 

By much the most striking incident in Burns's Life is his 
journey to Edinburgh ; but perhaps a still more important 
one is his residence ^t Irvine, so early as in his twenty-third 
year. Hitherto his life had been poor and toil worn ; but 
otherwise not ungenial, and, with all its distresses, by no 
means unhappy. In his parentage, deducting outward cir- 
cumstances, he had every reason to reckon himself fortunate. 
His father was a man of thoughtful, intense, earnest char- 
acter, as the best of our peasants are ; valuing knowledge, 
possessing some, and, what is far better and rarer, open- 
minded for more: a man with a keen insight and devout 
heart ; reverent towards God, friendly therefore at once and 
fearless, towards all that God has made : in one word, though 
but a hard-handed peasant, a complete and fully unfolded 
Man. Such a father is seldom found in any rank in society ; 
and was worth descending far in society to seek. Unfor- 
tunately, he was very poor ; had he been even a little richer, 
almost never so little, the whole might have issued far other- 
wise. Mighty events turn on a straw; the crossing of a 
brook decides the conquest of the world. Had this William 
Burns's small seven acres of nursery-ground anywise pros- 
pered, the boy Eobert had been sent to school ; had strug- 
gled forward, as so many weaker men do, to some university ; 
come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a regular well- 
trained intellectual workman, and changed the whole course 
of British Literature, — for it lay in him to have done this ! 
But the nursery did not prosper ; poverty sank his whole 
family j3elow the help of even our cheap school-system : 



Essay on Burns. 39 

Burns remained a hard-worked ploughboy, and British 
literature took its own course. Nevertheless, even in this 
rugged scene there is much to nourish him. If he drudges, 
it is with his brother, and for his father and mother, whom 
he loves, and would fain shield from want. Wisdom is not 
banished from their poor hearth, nor the balm of natural 
feeling : the solemn words, ' Let us worship God,^ are heard 
there from a priest-like father; if threatenings of unjust 
men throw mother and children into tears, these are tears 
not of grief only, but of holiest affection; every heart in 
that humble group feels itself the closer knit to^gvery 
other ; in their hard warfare they are there together, ajjittle 
band of brethren.^ Neither are such tears, and the deep 
beauty that dwells m them, their only portion. Light visits 
the hearts as it does the eyes of all living : there is a force, 
too, in this youth, that enables him to trample on misfor- 
tune ; nay, to bind it under his feet to make him sport. For 
a bold, warm, buoyant humor of character has been given 
him ; and so the thick-coming shapes of evil are welcomed 
wdth a gay, friendly irony, and in their closest pressure he 
bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague yearnings of ambition 
fail not, as he grows up ;[ dreamy fancies hang like cloud- 
cities around him ; the curtain of Existence is slowly rising, 
in many-colored splendor and gloom : and the auroral light 
of first love is gilding his horizon, and the music of song is 
on his path ; and so he walks 

in glory and in joy, 

. Behind his plough, upon the mountain side. 

y 

"uWe ourselves know, from the best evidence, that up to 
this date Burns was happy ; nay, that he was the gayest, 
brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being to be found in 
the world ; more so even than he ever afterwards appeared. 
But now, at this early age, he quits the paternal roof ; goes 
forth into looser, louder, more exciting society ; and becomes 



40 Carlyle. 

initiated in those dissipations, those vices, which a certain 
class of philosophers have asserted to be a natural prepara-. 
tive for entering on active life ; a kind of mud-bath, in which 
the youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, and, we sup- 
pose, cleanse himself , before the real toga of Manhood can 
be laid on him. We shall not dispute much with this class 
of philosophers ; we hope they are mistaken : for Sin and Ee- 
morse so easily beset us at all stages of life, and are always 
such indifferent company, that it seems hard we should, at 
any stage, be forced and fated not only to meet but to yield 
to them, and even serve for a term in their leprous armada. 
We hope it is not so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot 
be the training one receives in this Devil's service, but only 
our determining to desert from it, that fits us for true manly 
Action. We become men, not after we have been dissipated, 
and disappointed in the chase of false pleasure ; but after 
we have ascertained, in any way, what impassable barriers 
hem us in through this life ; how mad it is to hope for con- 
tentment to our infinite soul from the gifts of this extremely 
finite world ; that a man must be sufficient for himself ;' and 
that for suffering and enduring there is no remedy but striv- 
ing and doing. ' Manhood begins when we have in any way 
made truce with Necessity ; begins even when we have sur- 
rendered to Necessity, as the most part only do ; but begins 
joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled our- 
selves to Necessity ; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, 
and felt that in Necessity we are free.. Surely, such lessons 
as this last, which, in one shape or other, is the grand lesson 
for every mortal man, are better learned from the lips of a 
devout mother, in the looks and actions of a devout father, 
while the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in collision with 
the sharp adamant of Eate, attracting us to shipwreck us, 
when the heart is grown hard, and may be broken before it 
will become contrite. Had Burns continued to learn this, 
as he was already learning it, in his father's cottage, he 



Essay on Burns. 41 

would have learned it fully, which he never did ; and been 
saved many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and 
year of remorseful sorrow. 

-TJL It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in 
Burns's history, that at this time too he became involved in 
the religious quarrels of his district; that he was enlisted 
and feasted, as the fighting man of the New-Light Priest- 
hood, in their highly unprofitable warfare. At the tables 
of these free-minded clergy he learned much more than 
was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule of fanaticism 
iwakened in his mind scruples about Religion itself; and 
I whole world of Doubts, which it required quite another 
set of conjurors than these men to exorcise. We do not 
ay that such an intellect as his could have escaped similar 
loubts at some period of his history; or even that he could, 
it a later period, have come through them altogether vic- 
orious and unharmed : but it seems peculiarly unfortunate 
;hat this time, above all others, should have been fixed for 
he encounter. For now, with principles assailed by evil 
xample from without, by 'passions raging like demons ' 
rom within, he had little need of sceptical misgivings to 
vhisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his 
etreat if he were already defeated. He loses his feeling 
•f innocence; his mind is at variance with itself; the old 
livinity no longer presides there; but wild Desires and 
v^ild Repentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, 
le has committed himself before the world; his character 
or sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted 
P'orldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of 
Qen; and his only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve 
is guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest 
esperation now gathers over him, broken only by red 
ightnings of remorse. The whole fabric of his life is 
'lasted asunder; for now not only his character, but his 
ersonal liberty, is to be lost; men and Fortune are leagued 



42 Carlyl 



e. 



for his hurt; ^hungry Euin has him in the wind. 7 He 
sees no escape but the saddest of all : exile from his loved 
country, to a country in every sense inhospitable and 
abhorrent to him. While the 'gloomy night is gathering 
fast, ' in mental storm and solitude, as well as in physical, 
he sings his wild farewell to Scotland : 

Farewell, my friends ; farewell, my foes ! 
My peace with these, my love with those : 
The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr ! 

^/ . Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods; but still a 
false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited 
to Edinburgh ; hastens thither with anticipating heart ; is 
welcomed as in a triumph, and with universal blandish- 
ment and acclamation ; whatever is wisest, whatever is ; 
greatest or loveliest there, gathers round him, to saze on 1 
his face, to show him honor, sympathy, affection. /Burns's . 
appearance among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh must :■ 
be regarded as one of the most singular phenomena in 1 
modern Literature; almost like the appearance of some 
Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of modern Poli-- 
tics.^: For it is nowise as a 'mockery king,' set there by- « 
favor, transiently and for a purpose, that he will let him--j 
self be treated; still less is he a mad Eienzi, whose sudden), 
elevation turns his too weak head: but he stands there onij 
his own basis ; cool, unastonished, holding his equal rank ;] 
from Nature herself; putting forth no claim which there i 
is not strength in him, as well as about him, to vindicate. 
Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on this point: ' 

'It needs no effort of imagination,' says he, 'to conceive what the 
sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergymen 
or professors) must have been in the presence of this big-boned, black- 1 
browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who, having ' 
forced his way among them from the plough-tail at a single stride, 
manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation a most 

,i 



Essay on Burns. 4j 

thorough conviction, that in the society of the most eminent men of his 
nation he was exactly wliere he was entitled to be ; hardl:' deigned to 
flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional symptom of being flattered 
by their notice ; by turns calmly measured himself against the most 
3ultivated understandings of his time in discussion ; overpowered the 
')onsmots of the most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of mer- 
riment, impregnated with all the burning life of genius; astounded 
oosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social reserve, 
3y compelling them to tremble, — nay, to tremble visibly, — beneath the 
earless touch of natural pathos ; and all this without indicating the 
unaHest willingness to be ranked among those professional ministers 
)f excitement, who are content to be paid in money and smiles for 
ioing what the spectators and auditors would be ashamed of doing in 
heir own persons, even if they had the power of doing it ; and last, 
md probably worst of all, who w?;3 known to be in the habit of en- 
ivening societies which they would have scorned to approach, still 
nore frequently than their own, with eloquence no less magnificent; 
vith wit, in all likelihood still more daring ; often enough, as the 
uperiors whom he fronted without alarm might have guessed from 
he beginning, and had ere long no occasion to guess, with wit pointed 
.t themselves.' 

? The farther we remove from this scene, the more singu- 
ar will it seem to us : details of the exterior aspect of it 
.re already full of interest. Most readers recollect Mr. 
Valker's personal interviews with Burns as among the 
>est passages of his Narrative: a time will come when 
his reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, slight though it 
s, will also be precious : 

'As for Burns,' writes Sir Walter, 'I may truly say, Virgilium 
idi tantum. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, wh^n he came first to 
Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much inter- 
sted in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him : 
lut I had very little acquaintance with any literary people, and still 
8SS with the gentry of the west country ; the two sets that he most 
requented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my 
ither's. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to 
inner ; but had no opportunity to keep his word ; otherwise I might 
ave seen more of this distinguished man. As it was, I saw him one 



44 Carlyle. 

day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, where there were sev- 
eral gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remembei tlie 
celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of course, we youngsters sat silent, 
looked, and listened. The only thing I remember which was remark- 
able in Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print 
of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog 
sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow, with a chikl 
in her arms. These lines were written beneath : 

" Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, \ 

Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, — 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, .1 

Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery, baptized in tears." i 

Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the ideas .^l 
which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked >■ 
whose the lines were; and it chanced that nobody but myself remem-.. 
bered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's called,, 
by the unpromising title of " The Justice of Peace." I whispered my' 
information to a friend present ; he mentioned it to Burns, who re-;,- 
warded me with a look and a word, which, though of mere civility, 1 . 
then received and still recollect with very great pleasure. 

His person was strong and robust ; his manners rustic, not clown-V 



ish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of | 
its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents.4 
His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture: but to me it^J 
conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. .] 
I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the . 
portraits. I should have taken the poet, had I not known what he I 
was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, i.e.j) 
none of your modern agriculturists who kept laborers for their drudg- 
ery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There was a 
strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments ; the 
eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. , 
It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) I 
when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye I 
in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of | 
my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without ^ 
the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned * 
of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, ll 



II 



Essay on Burns. 4^ 

3ut without the least' intrusive forwardness ; and when he differed in 
>pinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time 
vitli modesty. I do not remember any part of his conversation dis- 
inctly enough to be quoted ; nor did I ever see him again, except in 
he street, where he did not recognize me, as I could not expect he 
hould. He was much caressed in Edinburgh : but (considering what 
iterary emoluments have been since his day) the efforts made for his 
elief were extremely trifling. 

! I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought Burns's acquaint- 
ince with English poetry was rather limited; and also that, having 
wenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, he talked 
f them with too much humility as his models : there was doubtless 
ational predilection in his estimate. 

This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to add, that 
is dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer dressed 
1 his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in malam partem, 
rhen I say, I never saw a man in company with his superiors in sta- 
:on or information more perfectly free from either the reality or the 
ffectation of embarrassment. I was told, but did not observe it, that 
is address to females was extremely deferential, and always with a 
irn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention 
irticiilarly. I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon remark this. 
-I do not know anything I can add to these recollections of forty 
ears since.' 

.The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of favor; 
le calm, unaffected, manly manner in which he not only 
ore it, but. estimated its value, has justly been regarded 
^ the best proof that could be given of his real vigor and 
itegrity of mind. A little natural vanity, some touches 
f hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of affectation, 
p least some fear of being thought affected, we could have 
irdoned in almost any man; but no such indication is to 
3 traced here. In his unexampled situation the young 
3asant is not a moment perplexed; so many strange lights 
) not confuse him, do not lead him astray. Nevertheless, 
6 cannot but perceive that this winter did him great and 
sting injury. A somewhat clearer knowledge of men's 
fairs, scarcely of their characters, it did afford him; but 



46 Carlyle. 

a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal arrangements in 
their social destiny it also left with him. He had seen the 
gay and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are born to 
play their parts; nay, had himself stood in the midst of 
it; and he felt more bitterly than ever, that here he was; 
but a looker-on, and had no part or lot in that splendid 
game. From this time a jealous indignant fear of social 
degradation takes possession of him; and perverts, so far] 
as aught could pervert, his private contentment, and his 
feelings towards his richer fellows. It was clear to Burns 
that he had talent enough to make a fortune, or a hundred ! 
fortunes, could he but have rightly willed this; it was 
clear also that he willed something far different, and there- 
fore could not make one. Unhappy it was that he had not 
power to choose the one, and reject the other; but must 
halt forever between two opinions, two objects; making 
hampered advancement towards either. But so is it with 
, many men: we 'long for the merchandise, yet would fain 

' keep the price ; ' and so stand chaffering with Fate, in vexa- 
tious altercation, till the night come, and our fair is over! 

U>X ,. The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in general 
more noted for clearness of head than for warmth of heart:! 
with the exception of the good old Blacklock, whose help 
was too ineffectual, scarcely one among them seems to have 
looked at Burns with any true sympathy, or indeed much 
therwise than as at a highly curious thing. By the great 
also he is treated in the customary fashion; entertained at 
their tables and dismissed : certain modica of pudding and 
praise are, from time to time, gladly exchanged for the 
fascination of his presence ; which exchange once effected, 
the bargain is finished, and each party goes his several way 
At the end of this strange season. Burns gloomily sums uf 
his gains and losses, and meditates on the chaotic future. 
In money he is somewhat richer; in fame and the show oJ 
happiness, infinitely richer; but in the substance of it, aj 



I 



Essay on Burns. 47 

poor as ever. Nay, poorer; for his heart is now maddened 
still more with the fever of worldly Ambition ; and through 
long years the disease will rack him with unprofitable suf- 
ferings, and weaken his strength for all true and nobler 
aiin3. 

' tJSVhat Burns was next to do or to avoid; how a man so 
circumstanced was now to guide himself towards his true 
advantage, might at this point of time have been a question 
for the wisest.'] It was a question, too, which apparently 
he was left altogether to answer for himself: of his learned 
or rich patrons it had not struck any individual to turn a 
thought on this so trivial matter. Without claiming for 
Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say that 
his Excise and Farm scheme does not seem to us a very 
unreasonable one; that we should be at a loss, even now, 
to suggest one decidedly better. Certain of his admirers 
have felt scandalized at his ever resolving to gauge; and 
would have had him lie at the pool, till the spirit of Pat- 
ronage stirred the waters, that so, with one friendly plunge, 
all his sorrows might be healed. Unwise counsellors! 
They know not the manner of this spirit; and how, in the 
lap of most golden dreams, a man might have happiness, 
were it not that in the interim he must die of hunger! It 
reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense of Burns, 
that he felt so early on what ground he was standing; and 
preferred self-help, on the humblest scale, to dependence 
and inaction, though with hope of far more splendid possi- 
bilities. But even these possibilities Avere not rejected in 
his scheme : he might expect, if it chanced that he had ar.y 
friend, to rise, in no long period, into something even like 
opulence and leisure; wiiile again, if it chanced that he 
had no friend, he could still live in security; and for the 
rest, he 'did not intend to borrow honor from any profes- 
sion.' We think, then, that his plan was honest and well- 
calculated : all turned on the execution of it. Doubtless it 



48 Carlyle. 

failed 5 yet not, we believe, from any vice inherent in itself. 
Nay, after all, it was no failure of external means, but of 
internal, that overtook Burns. His was no bankruptcy of 
the purse, but of the soul; to his last day, he owed no man 
anything. 

/^ yl^eanwhile he begins well: with two good and wise 
actionsT^His donation to his mother, munificent from a 
man whose income had lately been seven pounds a-year, 
was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. Generous 
also, and worthy of him, was his treatment of the woman 
whose life's welfare now depended on his pleasure. A 
friendly observer might have hoped serene days for him : 
his mind is on the true road to peace with itself: what 
clearness he still wants will be given as he proceeds ; for 
the best teacher of duties that still lie dim to us, is the 
Practice of those we see and have at hand. Had the 
'patrons of genius,' who could give him nothing, but taken 
nothing from him, at least nothing more ! The wounds of 
his heart would have healed; vulgar ambition would have 
died away. Toil and Frugality would have been welcome, 
since Virtue dwelt with them; and Poetry would have 
shone through them as of old: and in her clear ethereal 
light, which was his own by birthright, he might have 
looked down on his earthly destiny and all its obstruc- 
tions, not with patience only, but with love. 

^ , But the patrons of genius would not have it so. Pictui 
. esque tourists, =* all manner of fashionable danglers after 

* There is one little sketch by certain * English gentlemen ' of this class, 
which, though adopted in Carrie's Narrative, and since then repeated in 
most others, we have all along felt an invincible disposition to regard as 
imaginary : * On a rock that projected into the stream, they saw a man 
employed in angling, of a. singular appearance. He had a cap made of fox 
skin on his head, a loose greatcoat fixed round him by a belt, from which 
depended an enormous Highland broad-sword. It was Burns.' Now, we 
rather think, it was not Burns. For, to say nothing of the fox-skin cap, the 
loose and quite Hibernian watchcoat with the belt, what are we to make of 
this ' enormous Highland broad-sword ' depending from him ? More espe- 



Essay on Burns. 49 

literature, and, far worse, all manner of convivial Maece- 
nases, hovered round him in his retreat ;( and his good as 
well as his weak qualities secured them influence over him. 
He was flattered- by their notice; and his warm social 
nature made it impossible for hiui to shake them off, and 
hold on his Avay apart from them. These men, as we 
believe, were proximately the means of his ruin. Not 
that they meant him any ill; they only meant themselves 
a little good ; if he suffered harm, let him look to it ! But 
they wasted his precious time and his precious talent; they 
disturbed his composure, broke down his returning habits 
of temperance and assiduous contented exertion. Their 
pampering was baneful to him; their cruelty, which soon 
followed, was equally baneful. The old grudge against 
Fortune's inequality awoke with new bitterness in their 
neighborhood; and Burns had no retreat but to 'the Rock 
of Independence,' which is but an air-castle after all, that 
looks well at a distance, but will screen no one from real 
wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excitement, exas- 
perated alternately by contempt of others and contempt of 
himself. Burns was no longer regaining his peace of mind, 
but fast losing it forever. There was a hollowness at the 
heart of his life, for his conscience did not now approve 
what he was doing. 

c/A.mi(\. the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless re- 
morse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, a 
life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay, with Famine if it must 
be so, was too often altogether hidden from his eyes. ' And 
jret he sailed a sea where without some such loadstar there 
was no right steering. Meteors of French Politics rise 

jially, as there is no word of parish constables on the outlook to see whether, 
IS Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriff or that >f the pub- 
ic I Burns, of all men, had the least need, and the least tendency, to seek 
'or distinction either in his own eyes or those of others, by su(;h poor 
nummeries. 



50 Carlyle. 

before him, but these were not his stars. An accident this, 
which hastened, but did not originate, his worst distresses. 
In the mad contentions of that time, he comes in col- 
lision with certain official Superiors ; is wounded by them ; 
cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead mechanical 
implement, in any case, be called cruel: and shrinks, in 
indignant pain, into deeper self-seclusion, into gloomier 
moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its unity : it is 
a life of fragments ; led with little aim, beyond the melan- 
choly one of securing its own continuance, — 'in fits of wild 
false joy when such offered, and of black despondency when 
they passed awaj^ His character before the world begins 
to suffer: calumny is busy with him; for a miserable man 
makes more enemies than friends. Some faults he has 
fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes; but deep crimi- 
nality is what he stands accused of, and they that are not 
without sin cast the- first stone at him! For is he not 
a well-wisher to the French Revolution, a Jacobin, and 
therefore in that one act guilty of all? These accusations, 
political and moral, it has sine 3 appeared, were false • 
enough: but the world hesitated little to credit them. 
Nay, his convivial Maecenases themselves were not the last i 
to do it. There is reason to believe that, in his later years, ^, 
the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly withdrawn themselves : 
from Burns, as from a tainted person no longer worthy of I 
their acquaintance. That painful class, stationed, in all 
provincial cities, behind the outmost breastwork of Gen- 
tility, there to stand siege and do battle against the in- 
trusions of Grocerdom and Grazierdom, had actually seeUj 
dishonor in the society of Burns, and branded him with" 
their veto; had, as we vulgarly say, cut him! We find one 
passage in this Work of Mr. Lockhart's, which will not out 
of our thoughts : 

' A gentleman of that county, whose name I have ah-eady more than 
once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he was seldom 



Essay on Burns. 51 

more grieved than when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer even- 
ing about this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns walking 
alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the 
opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, 
all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom 
appeared willing to recognize him. The horseman dismounted, and 
joined Burns, who on his proposing to cross the street said: "Nay, 
nay, my young friend, that's all over now;" and quoted, after a 
pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad : 

" His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow. 
His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new ; 
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing. 
And casts himsel dowie upon the corn-bing. 

0, were we young as we ance hae been, 

We suld hae been galloping down on yon green, 

And linking it ower the lily-white lea ! 

A7id werena my heart light, I wad die/'' 

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain subjects 
escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting these verses, 
assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and taking 
his young friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably till 
the hour of the ball arrived. ' 

'^ Alas! when we think that Burns now sleeps 'where bitter 
indignation can no longer lacerate his heart/ * and that 
'. most of those fair dames and frizzled gentlemen already 
I lie at his side, where the breastwork of gentility is quite 
thrown down, — who would not sigh over the thin delu- 
sions and foolish toys that divide heart from heart, and 
make man unmerciful to his brother ! 

1(Tt was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns 
would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught worthy 
I of itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody; not the 
|:soft breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand of Fate, 
was now sweeping over the strings. And yet what har- 
mony was in him, what music even in his discords ! How 
* Ubi sxva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. Swift's Epitaph. 



52 Carlyle. 

the wild tones had a charm for the simplest and the wisest; 
and all men felt and knew that here also was one of the 
Gifted! 'If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the 
inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated 
from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had 
elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled ! ' 
Some brief pure moments of poetic life were yet appointed 
him, in the composition of his Songs. We can understand 
how he grasped at this employment; and how too, he 
spurned all other reward for it but what the labor itself 
brought him. Por the soul of Burns, though scathed and 
marred, was yet living in its full moral strength, though 
sharply conscious of its errors and abasement: and here, 
in his destitution and degradation, was one act of seeming 
nobleness and self-devotedness left even for him to per- 
form. He felt too, that with all the thoughtless follies ' 
that had 'laid him low,' the world was unjust and cruel to 
him; and he silently appealed to another and calmer time. 
Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for 
the glory of his country : so he cast from him the poor six- 
pence a-day, and served zealously as a volunteer. Let us 
not grudge him this last luxury of his existence; let him 
not have appealed to us in vain! The money was not 
necessary to him; he struggled through without it: long 
since, these guineas would have been gone ; and now the 
high-mindedness of refusing them will plead for him in 
all hearts forever. 
^2, ^^ ^^'® ^^^^ arrived at the crisis of Burns's life; for 
matters had now taken such a shape with him as could not 
long continue. If improvement was not to be looked for, 
Nature could only for a limited time maintain this dark 
and maddening warfare against the world and itself. We 
are not medically informed whether any continuance of 
years was, at this period, probable for Burns; whether his 
death is to be looked ou as in some sense an accidental 



Kssay on Burtis. 53 

event, or only as tlie natural consequence of the long series 
of events that had preceded. The latter seems to be the 
likelier opinion; and yet it is by no means a certain one. 
At all events, as we have said, some change could not be 
v^ery distant. £^Three gates of deliverance, it seems to us, 
were open for Burns: clear poetical activity; madness; or 
death. "7 TIi£L -iirst, with l ono-f>r 1ifH^^wn,H r.till pnsaiVtlp^ ^^^ 
though not probable; for.- physical" causes Were beginning 
"to be concerned in it: and yet. Burns had an iron resolu- 
Tiion; could he but have seen and felt, that not only his 
highest glory, but his first duty, and the true medicine 
for all his woes, lay here. The second was still less 
probable; for his mind was ever among the clearest and 
firmest. So the milder third gate was opened for him : and 
lie passed, not softly, yet speedily, into that still country 
(where the hail-storms and fire-showers do not reach, and 
the heaviest-laden wayfarer at length lays down his load! 

\T Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank 
unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise sympathy, 
. generous minds have sometimes figured to themselves, with 
a reproachful sorrow, that much might have been done for 
him; that by counsel, true affection, and friendly minis- 
trations, he might have been saved to himself and the 
world. We question whether there is not more tenderness 
of heart than soundness of judgment in these suggestions. 
It seems dubious to us whether the richest, wisest, most 
benevolent individual could have lent Burns any effectual 
help. Counsel, which seldom profits any one, he did not 
need; in his understanding, he knew the right from the 
wrong, as well perhaps as any man ever did; but the per- 
suasion which would have availed him, lies not so much in 
the head as in the heart, where no argument or expostula- 
tion could have assisted much to implant it. As to money 
again, we do not believe that this was his essential want; 



54 Carlyle. 

or well see how any private man could, even presupposing 
Burns's consent, have bestowed on him an independent for- 
tune, with much prospect of decisive advantage. It is a 
mortifying truth, that two men, in any rank of society, 
could hardly be found virtuous enough to give money, and 
to take it as a necessary gift, without injury to the mora^ 
entireness of one or both. But so stands the fact : Friend- 
ship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists ; 
except in the cases of kindred or other legal affinity, it is 
in reality no longer expected, or recognized as a virtue 
among men. A close observer of manners has pronounced 
* Patronage,' that is, pecuniary or other economic further- 
ance, to be Hwice cursed;' cursing him that gives, and 
him that takes ! And thus, in regard to outward matters 
also it has become the rule, as in regard to inward it 
always was and must be the rule, that no one shall look for 
effectual help to another; but that each shall rest contented 
with what help he can afford himself. tSuch, we say, is 
the principle of modern Honor; naturally enough growing 
out of that sentiment of Pride, which we inculcate and 
encourage as the'basis of our whole social morality i.3Iany 
a poet has been poorer than Burns; but no one was ever 
prouder: we may question whether, without great precau- 
tions, even a pension from Royalty would not have galled 
and encumbered, more "than actually assisted him. 
//^Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another 
class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks 
among us of having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of 
him. 1 We have already stated our doubts whether direct 
pecuniary help, had it been offered, would have been 
accepted, or could have proved very effectual. We shall 
readily admit, however, that much was to be done for 
Burns; that many a poisoned arrow might have been 
warded from his bosom; many an entanglement in his 
path, cut asunder by the hand of the powerful; and light 



Essay on Burns. 55 

and heat, shed on him from high places, would have made 
his humble atmosphere more genial; and the softest heart 
then breathing might have lived and died with some fewer 
pangs. Nay, we shall grant farther, and for Burns it is 
granting much, that, with all his pride, he would have 
thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one who 
had cordially befriended him: patronage, unless once 
cursed, needed not to have been twice so. At all events, 
the poor i)i'omotion he desired in his calling might have 
been granted: it was his own scheme, therefore likelier 
than any other to be of service. All this it might have 
been a luxury, nay, it was a duty, for our nobility to have 
done. No part of all this, however, did any of them do; 
or apparently attempt, or wish to do: so much is granted 
against them. But what then is the amount of their 
blame? Simply that they were men of the world, and 
walked by the principles of such men; that they treated 
Burns, as other nobles and other commoners had done 
other poets; as the English did Shakspeare; as King 
Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip and 
his GraMees did Cervantes. Do men gather grapes of 
thorns; or shall we cut down 6ur thorns for yielding only 
a fence and haws? How, indeed, could the ^nobility and 
gentry of his native land' hold out any help to this * Scot- 
tish Bard, proud of his name and country'? Were the 
nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to help them- 
selves? Had they not their game to preserve; their 
borough interests to strengthen; dinners, therefore, of 
various kinds to eat and give? Were their means more 
than adequate to all this business, or less than adequate? 
Less than adequate, in general ; few of them in reality were 
richer than Burns; many of them were poorer; for some- 
times they had to wring their supplies, as with thumb- 
screws, from the hard hand, and, in their need of guineas, 
to forget their duty of mercy: which Burns was never 



^6 Carlyle. 

reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive them. The game 
they preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, the 
borough interests they strengthened, the little Babylons 
they severally builded by the glory of their might, are all 
melted or melting back into the primeval Chaos, as man's 
merely selfish endeavors are fated to do : and here was an 
action, extending, in virtue of its worldly influence, we 
may say, through all time ; in virtue of its moral nature, 
beyond all time, being immortal as the Spirit of Goodness 
itself; this action was offered them to do, and light was 
not given them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. 
But better than pity, let us go and do otherwise. Human 
suffering did not end with the life of Burns ; neither was 
the solemn mandate, 'Love one another, bear one another's 
burdens,' given to the rich only, but to all men. True, we 
shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or our 
pity; but celestial natures, groaning under the fardels of 
a weary life, we shall still find; and that wretchedness 
which Fate has rendered voiceless and tuneless, is not the 
least wretched, but the most. 
Jf3"" Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns 's failure 
lies chiefly with the world. J The world, it seems to us, 
treated him with more, rather than with less, kindness than 
it usually shows to such men. It has ever, we fear, shown 
but small favor to its Teachers: hunger and nakedness, 
perils and revilings, the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice, 
have, in most times and countries, been the market-price 
it has offered for Wisdom, the wel-come with which it has 
greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify. 
Homer and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles, belong to 
old days; but the world's Marty rology was not completed 
with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly 
dungeons ; Tasso pines in the cell of a madhouse ; Camoens 
dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so 
'persecuted they the Prophets,' not in Judea only, but in all 



Essay on Burns. 57 

places where men have been. We reckon that every poet of 
Biirns's order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to his 
age ; that he has no right to expect great kindness from it, 
but rather is bound to do it great kindness; that Burns, in 
particuhxr, experienced fully the usual proportion of the 
world's goodness; and that the blame of his failure, as we 
have said, lies not chiefly witli the world. 
' ^ Where, then, does it lie? We are forced to answer: 
With himself; it is his inward, not his outward, misfor- 
tunes that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it 
otherwise ; seldom is a life morally wrecked but the grand 
cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, some want 
less of good fortune than of good guidance. Nature fash-^^ 
ions no creature without implanting in it the strength.^ 

riPftdfT2T_ff)r its a.pf.iQ]^ ^ pd dnra tinn; laast of all dOes she 

so_ neglect , her masterpiece and ^i-ing, the poetic soul. 
Neither can we believe that it is in the power of any exter- 
nal circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a man; nay, 
if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as to affect 
its essential health and beauty. The sternest sum-total 
of all worldly misfortunes is Death; nothing more can lie 
in the cup of human woe : yet many men, in all ages, have 
triumphed over Death, and led it captive; converting its 
physical victory into a moral victory for themselves, into 
a seal and immortal consecration for all that their past life 
had achieved. What has been done, may be done again : nay, 
it is but the degree and not the kind of such heroism that 
differs in different seasons; for without some portion of 
this spirit, not of boisterous daring, but of silent fearless- 
ness, of Self-denial in all its forms, no good man, in any 
scene or time, has ever attained to be good. 
*7 We have already stated the error of Burns ; and mourned 
over it, rather than blamed it. Tt was the want of unity in 
his purposes, of con sistency in his aims. ;-t]b^fe, hapless attenuate*" 
to mingle in friendly union the common spirit of the world 



5 8 Carlyle. 

with the spir it of poetry, which is of a far different and alta 
gether irreconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly j^^ 
and Burns could be nothing, no man formed as he was can be 
anything, by halves. The heart, not of a mere hot-blooded7~ 
popular Versemonger, or poetical Restaurateur y but of a true 
Poet and Singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, had 
been given him : and he fell in an age, not of heroism and 
religion, but of scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when 
true Nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied 
by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful prin 
ciple of Pride. The influences of that age, his open, kind, 
susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly untoward 
situation, made it more than usually difficult for him to cast 
aside, or rightly subordinate ; the better spirit that was 
within him ever sternly demanded its rights, its suprem- 
acy : he spent his life in endeavoring to reconcile these two ; 
fd lost it, as he must lose it, without reconciling them. 
Burns was born poor ; and born also to continue poor, for 
he would not endeavor to be otherwise : this it had been 
well could he have once for all admitted, and considered as 
finally settled. He was poor, truly ; but hundreds even of 
his own class and order of minds have been poorer, yet have 
suffered nothing deadly from it : nay, his own Father had a 
far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny than his was ; and 
he did not yield to it, but died courageously warring, and to 
all moral intents prevailing, against it. True, Burns had 
little means, had even little time for poetry, his only real 
pursuit and vocation ; but so much the more precious was 
what little he had. In all these external respects his case 
was hard ; but very far from the hardest. Poverty, inces- 
sant drudgery, and much worse evils, it has often been the 
lot of Poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to * 
conquer. Locke was banished as a traitor ; and wrote his 
Essay on the Human Understanding sheltering himself in a 
Dutch garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease when he com- 



Essay on Burns. 59 

posed Paradise Lost? Not only low, but fallen from a 
height ; not only poor, but impoverished ; in darkness and 
with dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, 
and found fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes fin- 
ish his work, a maimed soldier and in prison ? Nay, was not 
the Araucana, which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, writ- 
ten without even the aid of a paper ; on scraps of leather, 
as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any moment from 
that wild warfare ? 

^yTAiid. what, then, had these men, which Burns wanted ? 
Two things ; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable 
for such nienr ^ They had a true, religious principle of mor- 
als ; and a single, not a double aim in their activity. They 
were not self-seekers and self-worshipers ; but seekers and 
worshipers of something far better than Self. Not personal 
enjoyment was their object ; but a high, heroic idea of Keli- 
gion, of Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom, in one or the other 
form^ ever hovered before them ; in which cause they neither 
shrank from suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it 
as something Avonderf ul ; but patiently endured, counting it 
blessedness enough so to spend and be spent. Thus the 
' golden-calf of Self-love,' however curiously carved, was 
not their Deity ; but the Invisible Goodness, which alone is 
man's reasonable service. This feeling was as a celestial 
fountain, whose streams refreshed into gladness and beauty 
all the provinces of their otherwise too desolate existence. 
In a word, they willed one thing, to which all other things 
were subordinated and made subservient; and therefore 
they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks ; but its 
edge must be sharp and single : if it be double^ the wedge is 
bruised in pieces, and will rend nothing. 
' C^Part of this superiority these men owed to their age ; in 
which heroism and devotedness were still practised, or at 
least not yet disbelieved in; but much of it likewise they owed 
to themselves. With Burns, again, it was different. His 






60 Carlyle. 

morality, in most of its practical points, is that of a mere 
worldly man; enjoyment, in a finer or coarser shape, is the 
only thing he longs and strives for. A noble instinct some- 
times raises him above this ; but an instinct only, and acting 
only for moments. He has no Keligion ; in the shallow age 
wherein his days were cast, Eeligion was not discriminated 
from the New and Old Light forms of Eeligion ; and was, 
with these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men. His 
heart, indeed, is alive with a trembling adoration, but there 
is no temple in his understanding. He lives in darkness 
and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at best, is an 
nxious wish ; like that of Rabelais, ^ a great Perhaps.' 
He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; could he but 
have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided heart, it 
had been well. For Poetry, as Burns could have followed 
it, is but another form of Wisdom, of Eeligion; is itself 
Wisdom and Eeligion. But this also was denied him. His 
poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not be extin- 
guished within him, yet rises not to be the true light of his 
path, but is often a wildfire that misleads him. It was not 
necessary for Burns to be rich ; to be, or to seem, ^ indepen- 
dent : ' but it was necessary for him to be at one with his 
own heart ; to place what was highest in his nature highest 
also in his life : ' to seek within himself for that consistency 
and sequence, which external events would forever refuse 
him.' Ii£L_iias_bom^a ^oet ; poet£^^_waa..JOiaxeIestial ele- 
ment of his being, and should' have been the soul of his 
whole endeavors. Lifted into that serene ether, whither 
he had wings given him to mount, he would have needed 
no other elevation : poverty, neglect, and all evil save the 
desecration of himself and his Art, were a small matter to 
him ; the pride and the passions of the world lay far beneath 
his feet ; and he looked down alike on noble and slave, on 
prince and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with 
clear recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy- 



Essay on Burns. 6l 

with pity. Nay, we question whether, for his culture as a 

; Poet, poverty and much suffering for a season were not abso- 

hitely advantageous. Great men, in looking back over their 

, lives, have testified to that effect. ' I would not for much,' 

, says Jean Paul, ^ that I had been born richer.' And yet 

Paul's birth was ]30or enough ; for, in another place, he adds : 

*The prisoner's allowance is bread and water; and I had 

often only the latter.' But the gold that is refined in the 

hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has himself 

expressed it, * the canary-bird sings sweeter the longer it 

has been trained in a darkened cage.' 

|1 A man like Burns might have divided his hours between 
poetry and virtuous industry ; industry which all true feel- 
ing sanctions, nay, prescribes, and which has a beauty, for 
that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones : but to divide his 
hours between poetry and rich men's banquets was an ill- 
starred and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at ease 
at such banquets ? What had he to do there, mingling his 
music with the coarse roar of altogether earthly voices ; 
brightening the thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent 
him from heaven ? Was it his aim to enjoy life ? Tomorrow 
he must go drudge as an Exciseman ! We wonder not that 
Burns became moody, indignant, and at times an offender 
against certain rules of society ; but rather that he did not 
-grow utterly frantic, and run amuck against them all. How 
could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, 
ever know contentment or peaceable diligence for an hour ? 
What he did, under such perverse guidance, and what he 
forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural 
: strength and worth of his character. 

j^^oubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness ; but 
not in others ; only in himself ; least of all in simple increase 
of wealth and worldly ' respectability.' We hope we have 
now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, 
and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another 



(^i 



62 Carlyle. 

instance of it in these very days ? Byron, a man of an 
endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is 
born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an 
English peer : the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly 
career, are his by inheritance ; the richest harvest of fame he 
soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what 
does all this avail him ? Is he happy, is he good, is he true ? 
Alas, he has a poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite 
and the Eternal ; and soon feels that all this is but mount- 
ing to the house-top to reach the stars ! Like Burns, he is 
only a proud man ; might, like him, have ^ purchased a 
pocket-copy of Milton to study the character of Satan ; ' f or 
Satan also is Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, 
and the model apparently of his conduct. As m Burns's 
case, too, the celestial element will not mingle with the clay 
of earth ; both poet and man of the world he must not be ; 
vulgar Ambition will not live kindly with poetic Adoration ; 
he cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is 
not happy ; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. His 
life is falsely arranged : the fire that is in him is not a strong, 
still, central fire, warming into beauty the products of a 
world ; but it is the mad fire of a volcano ; and now — we 
look sadly into the ashes of a crater, which ere long will fill 
itself with snow ! 

'Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to their 
generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer Truth; 
they had a message to deliver, which left them no rest till it 
was accomplished ; in dim throes of pain, this divine behest 
lay smouldering within them ; for they knew not what it 
meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipation ; and they 
had to die without articulately uttering it. They are in the 
camp of the Unconverted; yet not as high messengers of 
rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft flattering singers, 
and in pleasant fellowship, will they live there : they are 
first adulated, then persecuted; they accomplish little for^ 



I 



Essay on Burns. 6^ 

others; they find no peace for themselves, but only death 
and the peace of the grave. We confess, it is not without 
a certain nioiirnful awe that we view tlie fate of these noble 
souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with 
all their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral taught 
in this piece of history, — twice told us in our own time! 
Surely to men of like genius, if there be any such, it carries 
with it a lesson of deep, impressive significance. Surely it 
would become such a man, furnished for the highest of all 
enterprises, that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider 
well what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he 
attempts it. For the words of Milton are true in all times, 
and were never truer than in this : ' He who would write 
heroic poems must make his whole life a heroic poem.' If 
he cannot first so make his life, then let him hasten from 
this arena ; for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, 
are for him. Let him dwindle into a modish balladmonger ; 
let him worship and besing the idols of the time, and the 
time will not fail to reward him. If, indeed, he can endure 
to live in that capacity ! Byron and Burns could not live as 
idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts consumed them ; 
and better it was for them that they could not. For it is 
not in the favor of the great or of the small, but in a life 
of truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, 
that a Byron's or a Burns's strength must lie. Let the great 
stand aloof from him, or know how to reverence him. 
Beautiful is the union of weaHh with favor and furtherance 
for literature; like the costliest flower-jar enclosing the 
loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation be mistaken. 
A true poet is not one whom they can hire by money or 

''naftery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of 

occasional verses, their purveyor of table-wit ; -hfi i^aJixuit-be ■ 

their menial, he cannot even, b© 4;ii^r partisan.'^ At the peril 
of both jiarties, let no such union be attempted! Will a 
Courser of the Sun work softly in the harness of a Dray- 



r 



64 Carlyle. 

horse ? His hoofs are of fire, and his path is through the 
heavens, bringing light to all lands ; will he lumber on mud 
highways, dragging ale for earthly appetites from door to 

But we must stop short in these considerations, which 
would lead us to boundless lengths.^. We had something to 
say on the public moral character of Burns ; but this also 
we must forbear. We are far from regarding him as guilty 
before the world, as guiltier than the average ; nay, from 
doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. 
Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the Pie- 
hiscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has 
seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of pity 
and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its 
judgments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which 
this one may be stated as the substance : It decides, like a 
court of law, by dead statutes ; and not positively but neg- 
atively, less on what is done right, than on what is or is 
not done wrong. Not the few inches of deflection from the 
mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the 
ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real 
aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the 
breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippo- 
drome ; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score 
of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are 
measured : and it is assumed that the diameter of the gin- 
horse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when 
compared with them ! Here lies the root of many a blind, 
cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which 
one never listens to with approval. Granted, the ship 
comes into harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged; the 
pilot is blameworthy ; he has not been all-Avisc and all- 
powerful: but to know lioio blameworthy, tell us first 
whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to 
Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. 




Essay on Burns. gr 

"With our readers in general, with men of right feeling ^ 
I anywliere, we are not required to i)lead for Burns. Jn pi ty- 
' ijuijidmiivation he lies QjQ^ in nil our hearts, in a far 

j nobler mausoleum than that one of marble ; neither will his 
I Works, even as they are, pass away from the memory of 
I men. AYhile the Shakspeares and Miltons roll on like 
; migjity y ^ioxi^ through the country of Thought, bearing 
I fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their 
I waves ^_.this little Valclusa^jljunj^ also"'arfest our 

I eye: for this also is of Natur?^wn and most cunning 
I workmanship, biirsts from the depths of the earth, with a 
'Trnrgusriihg-5iu'fenr,'iiito the light of day; and often will 
the traveler turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and 
jmuse among its rocks and pjnes ! 



NOTES 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 

Edinburgh Review, No. 96. — The Life of Robert Burns. By 
J. G. Lockhart, LL.B. Edinburgh, 1828. 

Lockhart has written a kind of "Life of Burns," ' wrote Carlyle 
to his brother in 1828, 'and men in general are making another up- 
roar about Burns. It is this book, a trivial one enough, which I 
am to pretend reviewing.' 

The famous Edinburgh quarterly, professing by its title to deal 
mainly in book-reviewing, could never have been the power it was 
if it had held itself strictly to so narrow a field. That the rela- 
tion of much of its best work to the hterature of the moment was 
merely nominal is shown not only by this paper but by many of 
Macaulay's best biographical and historical essays, notably Milton, 
Addison, and Lord Clive. Jeffrey, at that time editor of the Review, 
was of an easy and cultivated talent, but, Hke Macaulay, he was 
too much a man of the world, and too little a seer, to relish uncon- 
ventionality of any sort. He owned, indeed, in his relationship 
and attachinent to Mrs. Carlyle, a special motive for encouraging 
her husband, and had admitted to his columns, in 1827, the essay 
on Richter and German Literature. These papers, as Carlyle said 
long after, 'excited a considerable though questionable sensation 
in Edinburgh ; ' but mainly on the score of their subject and general 
mode of treatment, for the young author had not yet freed himself 
wholly from the conventional manner of the reviewer of that day. 
When, however, Jeffrey came to examine the manuscript of the 
Burns essay, he found it so different in method and style from any- 
thing he or his friends could or would have written in the circum- 
stances that he declined to accept it without modification. He 
talk(>d about its diffusencss, its unevenness of diction; stipulated 
that it be abridged one-half; and before sending the manuscript 
to the printer made many 'corrections,' and even insertions, with a 

67 



68 Essay on Burns. 

view to mitigating the 'verbosity and exaggeration' which he de- 
plored. Carlyle received the proof-sheets, and saw 'the first part 
cut all into shreds — the body of a quadruped with the head of a 
bird; a man shortened by cutting out the thighs and fixing the 
knee-caps on his hips.' He wrote at once to Jeffrey, refusing to 
let his work appear in any such mangled form. The portions which 
had been cut out were in the main replaced, and the essay now 
stands, we suppose, approximately as it was first written. Not 
more than approximately, it is clear; the first part, in particular, 
still shows signs of those 'editorial blotches' in the interest of con- 
ventional propriety, which Carlyle years later plaintively named 
to Emerson as characteristic of the Edinburgh Review in Jeffrey's 
time. The style of the essay, as Carlyle originally wrote it, is less 
fanciful and involved than his later writing ; so that it is a good 
piece of work for the reader to begin with. 

' It is one of the very best of his essays, ' says Froude, ' and was 
composed with an evidently peculiar interest, because the outward 
circumstances of Burns's life, his origin, his early surroundings, his 
situation as a man of genius born in a farmhouse not many miles 
distant, among the same people and the same associations as were so 
familiar to himself, could not fail to make him think often of himself 
while he was writing about his countryman.' 

(The dates given in these Notes are not for memorization, but 
simply to help the student ' place ' the persons and events men- 
tioned, as to their general period and significance.) 

Page 1. like Butler. Samuel Butler (1612-1680). The fact that 
Hudibras was one of Carlyle's favorite books, in his early days, 
accounts for the double allusion to its author in the limits of a single 
essay (see p. 55). To most modern readers one of the dullest, though 
certainly in its production the most timely, of satires, Hudibras 
won great applause from the fickle Charles and his court ; yet Butler 
was suffered to die in wretched obscurity, while his work was still 
1 1 everybody's mouth. — An interesting early office of his was the 
stewardship of Ludlow Castle, which he held just after the Restora- 
tion, when the neighborhood must have been still fruitful in mem- 
ories of the presentation of Milton's Comus. 

Carlyle may have had a sort of grim pun in mind in his ' bread 
and stone ' phrase — thinking of the stone monuments the world 
gave both Butler and Burns, after having starved them to death. 

The inventor of a spinning- jenny, etc. Carlyle means that the 
maker of something practical is hkely to get a quicker reward than 



Notes. 60 

an artist. But this is not always true of inventors; and in fact 
the inventor of the spinning-jenny, James Hargreaves, had his 
patents stolen and died poor. 

brave Mausoleum. Compare the French brave. Carlyle no 
doubt uses the adjective ironically. This tomb, which stands in 
the Dumfries churchyard, is an ugly affair, with a tin dome that 
literally ' shines over his dust.' 

sixth narrative. The biographies by Currie, Walker, Cromek, 
Heron, and Peterkin are perhaps those Carlyle had in mind, though 
other accounts of Burns, most of them on a small scale, preceded 
Lockhart's. 

might yet have been living. When this essay was written (1828) 
Burns, if he had lived, would have been not quite seventy. 

Mr. Lockhart. John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854). Son-in-law 
and chief biographer of Sir Walter Scott. 

P. 2. No man ... is a hero to his valet. This saying has been 
attributed not only to several French sources, among them Madame 
de Sevign6, but even, in a modified form, to Plutarch. Here Carlyle 
gives it the turn of ' A prophet hath no honor in his own country.' 

Sir Thomas Lucy . . . John a Combe. Stratford worthies whose 
names are connected by tradition with Shakespeare and certain 
doggerel verses ascribed to the poet. According to the legend, 
Sir Thomas Lucy prosecuted young Shakespeare for stealing a deer 
from his park at Charlcote, near Stratford, and Shakespeare * got 
back at him ' by posting an insulting ballad on Charlcote gates. 
John-a-Combe was a rich money-lender of Stratford, on whom, while 
ahve, Shakespeare is said to have written a comic epitaph. It was 
not flattering, but John-a-Combe left Shakespeare, then a prosperous 
citizen, a substantial legacy. His tomb is near Shakespeare's, in 
Stratford Church. 

Christian bowels. The ancients believed the bowels were the seat 
of mercy, as the liver was the seat of the passions. ' Bowels of mercy,' 
or ' of compassion ' are phrases to be found in the New Testament 
and in English frequently after the publication of the King James 
version of the Bible (1611). 

Excise Conmiissioners. We should say. Commissioners of In- 
ternal Revenue. 

The Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, according to Lockhart, 
were ' an association of the most distinguished members of the 
northern aristocracy.' Carlyle's respect is ironical. He had a 
keen contempt for the class which made a religion of hunting and 



yo Essay on Burns. 

* preserving ' game. To the Caledonian Hunt Burns dedicated 
the first Edinburgh edition of his poems. 

Ayr Writers. Lawyers, or legal agents. Sir Walter Scott's father 
was a ** writer to the signet." 

New and Old Light Clergy. The progressive ' New Lights,' 
with whom Burns became identified, were in open rebellion against 
the ' Old Lights,' the conservative element in the Scottish Church, 
whom Burns attacked in The Twa Herds, Holy Willie's Prayer, 
The Holy Fair (note on p. 18), etc. For a more gracious picture, 
see Barrie's Auld Licht Idylls and Window in Thrums. 

P. 4. Constable's Miscellany. Archibald Constable was the 
Edinburgh publisher who founded the Edinburgh Review and 
launched the Waverley Novels. The reading public was not then 
large enough to make pubhshing a safe business. Constable's 
failure involved Scott and put a great burden on his later years. 
Constable's Miscellany was almost a first attempt to give English 
readers a series of good books at reasonable prices. 

so clear, direct, and nervous. Nervous in the older sense — 
' sinewy.' So Shakespeare says ' nerves of the Nemean lion.' 

Mr. Morris Birkbeck. Author of Notes on a Journey in America 
(1818). 

backwoods of America. This from Carlyle means simply America. 
He repeatedly speaks to Emerson of a possible visit to Concord 
as a journey to ' the Western Woods.' 

Our notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant. 
— P. 5. Our own contributions . . . scanty and feeble. These 
and other moderate, even apologetic phrases, as well as the numerous 
repetitions of ' as we believe,' ' we think,' etc., which occur in the 
first part of this essay, are evidently the remnants of Jeffrey's ' edit- 
ing.' Certainly there is nothing of the sort to be found in Carlyle's 
later work. 

P. 6. without instruction, without model. See Introduction, p. xix. 

a Ferguson or Ramsay. It is hard to understand Carlyle's con- 
temptuous allusion to these two. They were Burns's direct prede- 
cessors and masters in the writing of Scottish verse. He owed 
almost everything to them but his genius, and he eagerly acknowl- 
edged the debt. He put up a stone to Ferguson's neglected grave 
in Canongate churchyard, Edinburgh; and reverently visited the 
shop that had once been Ramsay's. 

Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) was a poor country boy who became 
a wigmaker in Edinburgh, and later a bookseller, collected old Scotch 



Notes. 



71 



poems, and wrote much himself in the lowland dialect. lie became 
famous and lived to a prosperous old age. Robert Ferguson (1750- 
1774) was more directly Burns's master. He was a lawyer's clerk 
in Edinburgh, without much physical stamina or moral control, 
but with a vein of genius which was just beginning to find its outlet 
in the use of the Scotch tongue when his body and mind gave way, 
and he died in a madhouse. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, * Who- 
ever puts Ferguson right with fame cannot do better than 
dedicate his labor to the memory of Burns, who will be the best 
delighted of the dead.' For Burns's full debt to him, see Intro- 
duction, pp. xix-xx. 

darksome drudging childhood. Burns says that his early life 
combined ' the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil 
of a galley-slave.' 

Alas, his sun shone as through a tropical tornado, etc. Here 
follows one of those almost lyrical bursts which now and then surprise 
us in what Carlyle calls his ' crabbed sardonic vein.' 

P. 7. advised to write a tragedy. Burns himself had serious 
thoughts of turning to dramatic work. See Lockhart's Life of Burns, 
pp. 211, 317. 

'amid the melancholy main.' Quoted from Thomson's Castle 
of Indolence, stanza 30. 

Sir Hudson Lowe. Governor of the island of St. Helena, where 
Napoleon was imprisoned after his downfall. 

' Eternal Melodies.' The influence of Carlyle's German studies 
is evident not only in his syntax, but in the familiar use of words 
and phrases translated or imitated from the German. In a let- 
ter to Emerson (1837) occurs the following passage: 'I rejoice 
much in the glad serenity with which you look out on this wondrous 
Dwelling-place of yours and mine, — with an ear for the Ewigen 
Melodien, which pipe in the winds around us, and utter themselves 
forth in all sounds and sights and things: not to be written-down 
by gamut-machinery.' 

making man's life more venerable. More to be revered. 

P. 8. the ' Daisy,' etc. The following lines allude to the poems 
To a Mountain Daisy, To a Mouse, and A Winter Night, all of which 
may be found in the A ppendix. 

' it raises his thoughts,' etc. Burns says something hke this 
in his Journal (1784). There is no poem which is hkely to appeal 
more strongly to the imagination of any poet. Old Light or New, 
than the noble 104th Psalm, from which Burns quotes. 



72 Essay on Burns. 

P. 9. for defence, not for offence. This sort of pride, which 
Carlyle again praises in Johnson, was one of his own marked charac- 
teristics. In 1824, when he was still without profession or favorable 
prospect, he wrote : ' If it were but a crust of bread and a cup of 
water that Heaven has given thee, rejoice that thou hast none but 
Heaven to thank for it. A man that is not standing on his own 
feet soon ceases to be a man at all.' 

P. 10. ' a soul like an Aeolian harp.' A favorite figure of speech 
with Carlyle's oft-quoted ' Jean Paul.' For a similar use, sec 
Carlyle's first essay on Richter: 'a wild music as of wind-harpp,' 
etc. 

no fitter business, etc. Though Burns made some fun of himself 
as an official, he seems to have taken the job of ' ganger ' quite of 
his own choice. 

occasional effusions. Poems inspired by special occasions or inci- 
dents. 

P. 11. Horace's rule. 

Si vis me flere, dolendum est 
Primum ipsi tihi. — Ars Poetica, 102. 

Freely rendered : ' If you would have me in tears, first must you 
yourself know sorrow.' 

P. 12. practical appliance. Practical apphcation. 

Byron. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). 

his Harolds and Giaours . . . Don Juan. Childe Harold, The 
Giaour, and Don Juan are long narratives in verse, partly satirical, 
partly romantic. 

P. 13. sulphurous humor. Diabolic mood. 

this vice. The vice of insincerity. 

the only thing approaching to a sincere work. For a different 
estimate read Matthew Arnold's essay on Byron. You will note 
that his final judgment is founded upon the following proposition 
quoted from Swinburne : ' The power of Byron's personality lies 
in the " splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his 
offences, and outweighs all his defects; the excellence of sincerity 
and strength." ' 

to read its own consciousness, etc. We need to keep this passage 
in mind in reading (p. 36) that Burns ' never attains to any clearness 
regarding himself ' ; and to decide which of these opinions is more 
consistent with the final comparison of Burns and Byron, at the 
close of the essay. 



Notes. 73 

p. 14. letters to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excellent. Even 
in Carlyle's youth the fashion of British letter-writing wiis formal. 
Only in writing to men of iiis own station has Burns the excellence 
of unconscious ease. See Lockhart's Life for numerous extracts 
from letters of Burns to Mrs. Dunlop. He himself said of his 
English : ' 1 have not that command of the language that I hav<* 
of my native tongue ; in fact, I think my ideas are more barren in 
English than in {Scottish. ' 

rose-colored Novels and iron-mailed Epics. At this time Scott 
and Cooper were at the height of tlieir fame; Byron was not long 
dead, and Southey, in his poetry still more remote from the represen- 
tation of real life, had been for fifteen years poet-laureate. 

P. 16. Or are men suddenly grown wise, etc. Johnson records 
the fact that neither Swift nor Pope ever succumbed to laughter. 
Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son : ' How low and unbecoming 
a thing laughter is ! I am sure that since I have had the full use of 
my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh.' Johnson himself, 
like Carlyle, ' laughed all over,' and used to say that ' the size of a 
man's understanding might always be measured by his mirth.' 

Delphi itself will not make him one. That is, even if he were to 
dwell at Delphi, the seat of the famous oracle, he could not attain 
the prophetic powers of a true poet. 

The Minerva Press was largely responsible for the flood of maudlin 
sensationahsm that debauched the taste of the English novel-reader 
during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. 

P. 17. Mossgiel and Tarbolton. The two farms on which the 
Burns family lived during the years when Burns did much of his 
best work. 

the passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther. Passions for 
evil and for good. The Roman Borgias of the fifteenth century 
were (according to tradition) devotees of vice and crime. Martin 
Luther (1483-1546) was the great German leader of the Protestant 
Reformation. 

saloons. Compare the French salon. 

Crockford's. A fashionable gambling club in London. 

Tuileries. The royal palace in Paris, burned by the Commune 
in 1871. 

Such cobweb speculations . Three years before this essay on Burns 
was written, Lord Macaulay had contributed to the Ediiihurgh Re- 
view his essa}' on Milton. In it, arguing from Milton's remark that 
he had been ' born an age too late,' Macaulay makes his famous 



74 Essay on Burns. 

generalisation, which Carlyle evidently has in mind here : ' We think 
that, as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.' 

Wounded Hare. See Appendix, p. 91. It is included there as 
an example of Burns at his most artificial. In his English verse as 
well as prose, Burns shows often the ' highflown inflated tone,' 
' the stilting emphasis ' of which Carlyle has spoken (page 13). 

Hallowe'en is a poem of some length, in Burns's broadest Scotch, 
describing the country games and rites of that season. 

no Theocritus, till Burns. Theocritus, the Greek poet of pastoral 
life, third century, b.c. E. C. Stedman says that he ' created his 
own school, with no models save those obtainable from the popular 
mimes and catches of his own region ; just as Burns, availing him- 
self of the simple Scottish ballads, lifted the poetry of Scotland to 
an eminent and winsome individuality.' However it may have 
been with Theocritus, this was not strictly true of Burns. For with 
Burns, the ' simple ballads ' of his land had been treated by earlier 
hands, Ramsay, Ferguson, and others. (See note on page 6, and 
Introduction, page xix.) More than this, most of his poems were 
adaptations and improvements of earher work by others. Hallow- 
e'en is based on a poem of the same title by John Mayne. One 
student of Burns (Professor J. G. Dow) goes so far as to say that 
' of his poems hardly any except the two masterpieces, The Jolly 
Beggars and Tam o' Shanter, is original in the sense that the first 
idea and form of it sprung from his own brain ; and even the latter 
of these is not strictly entitled to claim this originality.' That this 
is not a reflection on Burns's creative genius is made clear by the 
same writer's generalisation : ' In actual borrowing and imitation 
his derived work exceeds that of any other great English author 
except Shakespeare,' This brings up the whole question of the 
difference between creative originality and mere invention or novelty. 

P. 18. Council of Trent. A great general council of the Roman 
Church, A.D. 1545-1563. It was held at Trent, in the Tyrol, shortly 
before Luther's death, and, with a very different object in view, 
brought about a final separation between the Protestants and the 
Papacy. 

The Holy Fair describes a mock conference of the Old Lights, 
to which the poet goes by invitation of the merry maid Fun, who 
promises him — and the promise is kept — much amusement at 
the expense of the hags Superstition and Hypocrisy. 

P. 19. Note that here Carlyle calls clearness of sight ' the root and 
foundation of every sort of talent,' while in another passage (p. 13) 



Notes. 75 

he has said that sincerity of expression is * the root of most other 
virtues.' A passage in his lecture on The Hero as Poet shows how 
the two statements hang together in his mind : ' Poetic creation, 
what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that 
will describe the thing follows of itself from such clear intense sight 
of the thing.' 

the burin of a Retsch. Moritz Retsch (1779-1857). A German 
painter and etcher, illustrator of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare. 

A ' burin ' is the tool of an engraver. 

Winter Night. See A Winter Night, Appendix, p. 89. 

Auld Brig. The quoted passage is from The Brigs of Ayr, a poem 
of some length written on the occasion of the building of a new bridge 
across the Ajt. It is really the Auld Brig (old bridge) which prophe- 
sies the fall of the new one. For the Scottish words in this and other 
quotations in the text, see the Glossary. 

P. 20. A Poussin-picture of that Deluge. Nicholas Poussin 
(1594-1665) was a famous French painter. One of his best-known 
works was a painting called The Deluge. 

Farmer . . . Auld Mare. See The Farmer's New-Year Morning 
Salutation to His Auld Mare, Maggie^ Appendix, p. 93. 

Smithy of the Cyclops. See Odyssey, Book IX. 

yoking of Priam's Chariot. See Iliad, Book XXIV. 

Bum-the-wind. Scotch nickname for blacksmith. 

Scotch Drink. A poem by Burns in which the blacksmith, 
' Burnewin,' is a leading figure. 

The pale moon is setting, etc. Incorrectly quoted from Burns's 
Open the Door to Me, Oh ! This is the right reading : 

' The wan moon is setting beyond the white wave. 
And Time is setting wi' me, oh ! 
False friends, false love, farewell ! for mair 
I'll ne'er trouble them, nor thee, oh ! ' 

Richardson and Defoe. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and 
Daniel Defoe (1661-1731). Pioneers of the English novel. 
P. 21. red-wat-shod. From the Epistle to William Simpson. 

' At Wallace' name, what Scottish blood 
But boils up in a spring-tide flood ! 
Oft have our fearless fathers strode 

By Wallace' side. 
Still pressing onward, red-wat-shod, 
Or glorious died ! ' 



76 Essay on B 



urns. 



too frightfully accurate for Art ! A criticism that may fairly be 
made of many of Carlyle's own descriptions in Sartor Resartus and 
The French Revolution. 

such cases as that of Keats. John Keats (1753-1828). Beyond 
challenge, one of the great English poets. Carlyle's savage judgment 
of him is based on a radical difference in their genius : Keats wor- 
shipped Beauty, while Carlyle worshipped Truth. When the essay 
appeared in the Edinhurgh Review, Jeffrey toned down, and indeed 
quite changed the meaning of, this passage. Carlyle restored it 
in the collected Essays. 

P. 22. Hell of Dante. Dante Ahghieri (1265-1321). The 
Inferno is the first and most famous part of his Divine Comedy. The 
other two parts are : the Purgotorio and the Paradiso. 

might have . . . indited a Novum Organum. Oddly enough, 
there has been a modern attempt to prove the converse of this : 
that the author of the Novum Organum, Francis Lord Bacon (15G1- 
1626) not only might have, but must have, written the plays called 
Shakespeare's. 

in the passage above quoted. There is nothing about the ' doc- 
trine of association ' in the passage quoted (p. 21). Probably it 
was longer when first printed, was cut for later publication, and 
Carlyle overlooked this allusion. 

P. 23. 'doctrine of association.' The doctrine that 'ideas or 
states of mind are so connected one with another that one image 
in memory will call up another, and this another, so that thought 
is one continuous stream ' (Dracass). 

P. 24. I thought me, etc. See A Winter Night, Appendix, p. 89. 

P. 25. But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben. See closing lines of 
the Address to the Deil, Appendix^ p. 97. 

Dr. Slop . . . my uncle Toby. Characters in the Tristram 
Shandy of Laurence Sterne (1713-1768). 

Indignation makes verses. In one of his Satires the Roman poet 
Juvenal says, ' If nature withholds talent, indignation makes 
verses.' 

he loved a good hater. Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said of 
a friend, long dead, ' Dear Bathurst was a man to my very heart's 
content : he hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig , 
he was a very good hater.' 

Dweller in yon Dungeon Dark. It is hard to understand Carlyle's 
admiration for this poem, which is a good illustration of how stiff 
and bombastic Burns could be when he used the formal hterary 



Notes. yy 



English of the eightecntli cciiturv. It is called Ode Sacred to the 
Memory of Mrs. Oswald of Auchcncruive. Burns's own amusing 
account of its origin shows that there was a personal grudge to point 
his scorn of a very rich and very mean woman : 

' In January last (1789), on my road to Ayrshire, I had put up 
at Bailie Whigham's in Sanquhar, the only tolerable inn in the place. 
The frost was keen, and the grim evening and howling wind were 
ushering in a night of snow and drift. My horse and I were both 
much fatigued with the labors of the day, and just as my friend the 
Bailie and I were bidding defiance to the storm, over a smoking bowl, 
in wheels the funeral pageantry of the late great Mrs. Oswald ; and 
poor I am forced to brave all the horrors of a tempestuous night, 
and jade my horse, my young favorite horse, whom I had just 
christened Pegasus, twelve miles further on, through the wildest 
moors and hills of Ayrshire, to New Cumnock, the next inn. The 
powers of prose and poesy sink under me, when I would describe 
what I felt. Suffice it to say, that when a good fire at New Cumnock 
had so far recovered my frozen sinews, I sat down and wrote the 
enclosed ode.' 

Furies of Aeschylus. The Furies play the part of Chorus in the 
tragedy called The Eumenides. 

Scots wha hae wi' "Wallace bled. Burns's famous song, variously 
known as Scots Wha Hae, Bruce' s Address, and Bannockhurn. See 
Appendix, p. 101. 

Macpherson's Farewell. See Appendix;, p. 102. 

Cacus, Nimrod, Napoleon. C.^rlyle sees Macpherson (who by 
tradition fiddled the tune of the early version of this song at the 
gallows, sang it, and broke his fiddle over his knee) as a mighty robber 
hunter, and warrior — as great a man as he could be in his little 
world. 

P. 27. At Thebes, and in Pelops' line. The allusion is to Milton's 
II Penseroso: 

' Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy 
In sceptered pall come sweeping by. 
Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line. 
Or the tale of Troy divine.' 

Oedipus was King of Thebes; Agamemnon was grandson of. Pelops. 

P. 28. Tarn o' Shanter. See Appendix, p. 105. Lockhart says 

in his Life of Burns (Chap. VII) : * To the last. Burns was of the 

opinion that Tam o' Shanter was the best of his productions, and 



7 8 Essay on Burns. 

although it does not often happen that poet and pubhc come to the 
same conclusion on such points, I believe the decision in question 
has been all but unanimously approved of.' 

Tieck . . . Musaus. Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and Johann 
Musaus (1735-1787). Both writers are represented in Carlyle's 
early translations from the German. Both dealt largely with the 
materials of folklore. Carlyle says of Musaus : ' He does not 
approach the first rank of writers ; he attempts not to deal with 
the deeper feelings of the heart. . . . Musaus is in fact no poet 
... he is nothing or very httle of a maker.' On the other hand, 
* Tieck is no ordinary man ; he is a true poet, a poet born as well as 
made.' 

P. 29. The Jolly Beggars. A long descriptive poem suggested 
by a carouse Burns once found going on in a squalid inn near home. 
' Poosie-Nansie's ' ale-house was a real place. The raucle carlin 
(sturdy crone) and other figures here mentioned are brought out 
vividly in the poem. 

Teniers. David Teniers (1610-1694), A Dutch painter of ' low 
life.' 

P. 30. Beggars' Opera. A comic opera by John Gay (1685- 
1732), which was not only very successful in its own day, but has 
been recently ' revived ' with success on the modern stage. 

Beggars' Bush. A seventeenth century play, perhaps by Beau- 
mont and Fletcher. 

Ossorius, the Portugal Bishop. Jeronymo Osorio, once affectedly 
called the ' Cicero of Portugal.' It was Lord Bacon who said 
that ' his vein was weak and waterish.' 

P. 31. his Songs are music. See Carlyle's discussion of Song 
in The Hero as Poet. Burns's old schoolmaster says : ' Robert's 
ear was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable. It was long 
before I could get him to distinguish one tune from another.' This 
is remarkable, as according to Burns's own testimony the origin 
of nearly all his songs was in music. See Introduction, p. xx. 

P. 32. Our Fletcher. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716). 

Our Grays and Glovers. The famous Elegij in a Country Church- 
yard of Thomas Gray (1716-1771) is ' steeped in England,' says 
Stopford Brooke. It is odd that Carlyle should mention Richard 
Glover (1712-1785), a long-forgotten verse-maker, beside Gray. 

Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village of 
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) are thoroughly British in scene and 
character. 



Notes. 79 



Rambler . . . Rasselas. The Rambler was a series of John- 
sonian essays, on the plan of the moralizing papers in The Spectator 
of Addison. Rasselas is a moralizing romance supposed to be laid 
in Abyssinia. 

P. 33. John Boston. This should be Thomas Boston, a'Seottish 
minister of some note (1G7G-1832). 

Jacobite blood. The Jacobites were the adherents of the Stuart 
Pretender to the British throne. 

Lord Kames . . . Hume, Robertson, Smith. Lord Kames's 
Elements of Criticistn was much praised in its day, but Goldsmith 
said of it, * It is easier to write that kind of book than to read it. 
David Hume, William Robertson, and Adam Smith were Scotchmen 
— a philosopher, an historian, and a pohtical economist — who 
attained fame in the eighteenth century. 

Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau. The leading poets 
and critics of the French classical period, in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries. 

Montesquieu, Mably, Quesnay. French pubHcists and economists 
of the same period. 

La Fleche. A town in France in which David Hume spent some 
years, in order to write in peace. 

P. 35. ' a tide of Scottish prejudice.' It was the boyish reading of 
a history of Sir William Wallace which. Burns says, ' poured a tide,' etc. 

A wish (I mind its power), etc. See Burns's Epistle to the Guidwife 
of Wauchope House, Appendix, p. 117. 

P. 36. he never attains to any clearness regarding himself. 
There is no more touching comment upon Burns's hmitations than 
the following complacent passage from his Autobiography: ' It was 
ever my opinion that the mistakes and blunders of which we see 
thousands guilty, are owing to their ignorance of themselves. To 
know myself has been all along my study.' 

P. 38. Comparison has been made between the hard-handed 
peasant here described, and Carlyle's own father. The senior 
Burns in this description lacks the characteristic of stern restraint 
which made it possible for Carlyle to say of his father, ' We had 
all to complain that we durst not freely love him.' Burns, how- 
ever, ascribes to his father a trait which was equally distant from 
the character of James Carlyle : that of ' headlong ungovernable 
irascibihty.' 

the crossing of a brook. Alluding to Caesar's crossing the Uttle 
Rubicon that divided Italv from Gaul. 



8o Essay on Burns. 

P. 39. a priest-like father. See The Cotter's Saturday Night, 
Appendix, p. 124. 

in glory and in joy, etc. Quoted incorrectly from Wordsworth's 
tribute to Burns in The Leech-Gatherer: 

' Of him who walked in glory and in joy, 
Following his plow, along the mountain side.' 

The gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being. 
Murdoch, the schoolmaster, whose authority Carlyle cites later, 
says, ' Robert's countenance was generally grave, and expressive 
of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful mind.' ' At those 
years, said Burns, of the same period, ' I was by no means a favorite 
with anybody.' For further particulars, which put Carlyle's im- 
pression of the poet's boyhood somewhat in doubt, see Lockhart's 
Life of Burns, Chap. I. 

P. 40. sharp adamant of Fate. Adamant, chaos, welter, hulls, 
hearsays, furtherances, formulas, are among the words which you 
will find Carlyle using to the point of mannerism. 

P. 41. 'passions raging like demons.' 'My passions, once 
lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they found vent in rhyme ; 
and then the conning over my verses like a spell soothed all to quiet,' 
are Burns's words. 

his character for sobriety. His reputation for respectable conduct, 
as for sobriety in the narrower sense. Burns's brother Gilbert 
testified that, despite his praise of ' Scotch drink ' and various 
local rumors, ' I do not recollect . . . till his growing celebrity 
occasioned his being often in company, to have seen him intoxicated ; 
nor was he at all given to drinking.' 

P. 42. ' hungry Ruin has him in the wind.' 

* I took a steerage passage in the first ship that was to sail from the 
Clyde; for " Hungry Ruin had me in the wind." I had been for 
some days skulking from covert to covert, under all the terrors of a 
jail. I had taken the last farewell of my few friends ; my chest was 
on the way to Greenock ; I had composed the last song I ever should 
measure in Caledonia, " The gloomy night is gathering fast," when 
a letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my 
schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition.' — 

Burns's Autobiography. 

The original reading of the last verse Carlyle quotes is, ' Fare- 
well, the bonnie banks of Ayr.' Which is the better version? 



Notes. 8 1 

A mad Rienzi. The Roman adventurer of the fourteenth century 
who made himself master of Rome, but came to a tragic end. 

P. 43. societies which they would have scorned. ' It was little 
in Burns's character,' says Lockhart, ' to submit to nice and scrupu- 
lous rules, when he knew that by crossing the street he could find 
society who would applaud him the more, the more heroically all 
such rules were disregarded.' 

Virgilium vidi tantum. Freely, " I have had at least a glimpse 
of Virgil." Ovid, Tristia, IV. 10, 51. 

Langhome. John Langhorne (1735-1779), minor poet, and 
translator of Plutarch's Lives. The second verse of the quotation 
reads, in the original, ' Perhaps that parent mourned her soldier 
slain.' Is Scott's variation an improvement? 

P. 46. Of the good old Blacklock, Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale, 
* This morning I saw at breakfast Dr. Blacklock the blind poet, 
who does not remember to have seen light, and is read to by a poor 
scholar, in Latin, French, and Greek. He was originally a poor 
scholar himself. I looked upon him with reverence.' 

modica of pudding and praise. Contrast this with the passage 
quoted (p. 43) to the effect that Burns did not ' rank with those 
professional ministers of excitement,' etc. Lockhart elsewhere 
gives an incident which illustrates the poet's independence : * A 
certain stately peeress sent to invite him, without, as he fancied, 
having sufficiently cultivated his acquaintance beforehand. "Mr. 
Burns," answered the bard, "will do himself the honor of waiting on 

the of , provided her ladyship will invite also the Learned 

Pig." Such an animal was then exhibiting in the Grass-market.' 

P. 47. Be sure you understand exciseman and gauger as they 
are appHed to Burns. — There is no doubt that on the whole he 
was faithful in the discharge of his duties, but here is an anecdote 
told by a Professor Gillespie, which indicates that occasionally the 
poet in Burns got the better of the exciseman. ' An information 
had been lodged against a poor widow of the name of Kate Watson, 
who had ventured to serve a few of her old country friends with a 
draught of unhcensed ale, and a lacing of whiskey. I saw 
him [Burns] enter her door, and anticipated nothing short of an im- 
mediate seizure. A nod, accompanied by a significant movement 
of the forefinger, brought Kate to the doorway, and I was near 
enough to hear the following words: "Kate, are ye mad? D'ye 
no ken that the supervisor and I will be in upon you in the course 
of forty minutes? Guid bye t'ye at present." ' 



82 Essay on Burns. 

P. 48. To his last day, he owed no man anything. Carlyle is 
mistaken here. Not long before his death, Burns wrote the following 
desperate lines to his cousin; on the same day sending a similar 
appeal, to a friend, Mr. Thomson : * A rascal of a haberdasher, to 
whom I owe a considerable bill, taking it into his head that I am 
dying, has commenced a process against me, and will infallibly put 
my emaciated body into jail. Will you be so good as to accommo- 
date me, and that by return of post, with ten pounds? — Save me 
from the horrors of a jail ! ' 

P. 49. Maecenases. The name of the poet Horace's protector 
is used by Carlyle, as well as by Macaulay, interchangeably with 
'patron.' Until the reading public grew large enough — well 
into the eighteenth century — writers looked as a matter of course 
to 'patrons,' rich and usually titled men, to support them. 

These men . . . the means of his ruin. Carlyle sums this up 
eloquently at the close of his lecture on The Hero as Man of Letters : 

'. . . Alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters 
were the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it 
impossible for him to live. They gathered round him in his Farm ; 
hindered his industry ; no place was remote enough from them. He 
could not get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed 
to do so. He falls into discontents, into miseries, faults ; the world 
getting ever more desolate for him ; health, character, peace of mind 
all gone ; — solitary enough now. It is tragical to think of ! These 
men came but to see him ; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor 
no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement : they got 
their amusement ; — and the Hero's life went for it ! 

' Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of " Light- 
chafers," large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illumin- 
ate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel 
with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honor 
to the Fire-flies ! But — ! . . .' 

P. 50. a Jacobin. An extremely radical or, as we now say, ' red ' 
society in France, at the time of the Revolution. 

These accusations . . . were false enough. The fact that 
on one occasion Burns sent to the French Convention a number 
of small cannon which in his official capacity he had captured from 
a smuggling vessel, made such charges from headquarters not un- 
natural. Burns's sympathy with the French, however, seems 
to have been far less deep-seated than his feeling for America. 
* According to the tradition of the neighborhood. Burns gave great 



Notes. 83 

offence by demurring, in a large mixed compan}', to the toast, " The 
health of William Pitt " ; and left the room in indignation because 
the society rejected what he wished to substitute, namely, " The 
health of a greater and better man, George Washington." ' See 
Lockhart's Life, Chap. VII. Read also Burns's unfinished ballad 
on The American War. 

P. 51. 'entertained him very agreeably — with a bowl of his 
usual potation,' says Lockhart. 

P. 52. The ' high-mindedness of refusing them ' was rated at 
its full worth by Burns himself, in a bombastic letter to his editor, 
which offers a fair example of his English prose at its worst : * I 
swear by that honor which crowns the upright statue of Robert 
Burns's integrity, on the least motion of it [payment] I will indig- 
nantly spurn the by-past transaction [the unfortunate editor had 
sent him a draft for £ 5], and from that moment commence to be 
an entire stranger to you. Burns's character for generosity of sen- 
timent and independence of mind will, I trust, long outlive any of 
his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply ; at least I will 
take care that such a character he shall deserve.' 

P. 53. So the milder third gate was opened. Do the facts of 
Burns's death entirely justify the pathos of this passage? 

P. 54. that sentiment of Pride, which we inculcate, etc. See 
note on p. 9. 

P. 55. poor promotion he desired in his calling. Burns tried to 
get promotion from Supervisor to Excise Collector. 

Butler. See note on p. 1. 

Cervantes (1547-1616). Author of Don Quixote.- 

thorns . . . fence . . . haws. Alluding to the hawthorn hedges of 
England. 

Roger Bacon (1214-1294). English philosopher and scientist. 

Galileo ( 1564-1642) . Italian inventor of the telescope, imprisoned 
for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun. 

Tasso. Torquato Tas.so (1544-1595), author of the Italian epic 
Jerusalem Delivered. 

Camoens. Luiz de Camoens (1524-1580). Author ot the Por- 
tuguese epic The Lusiad. 

P. 58. Restaurateur. Restaurant-keeper. Carlyle wrote in his 
Note Book (Dec. 3, 1826) : * It is a damnable heresy in criticism 
to maintain either expressly or impHcitly that the ultimate object of 
poetry is sensation. That of cookery is such, but not that of poetry. 
Sir Walter Scott is the great intellectual restaurateur of Europe. 



84 Essay on Burns. 

What are his novels — any one of them ? Are we wiser, better, 
holier, stronger? No. We have been amused.' 

Locke. John Locke (1632-1704). 

P. 59. The Araucana. Poem by a sixteenth century Spaniard, 
Alonso de Ercilla. 

P. 60. like that of Rabelais. Frangois Rabelais (1495-1553). 
The great satirical humorist of France, whose last words are said 
to have been, ' I am going to the Great Perhaps.' 

P. 61. Jean Paul. Literary name of Johann Paul Friedrich 
Richter (1763-1825) ; German mystic and humorist, and one of 
Carlyle's acknowledged masters. 

P. 64. Swift. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Greatest of English 
satirists and author of Gulliver's Travels. 

Rousseau. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). French social 
philosopher and autobiographer. Carlyle celebrates him in his ' Hero 
as Man of Letters.' 

Ramsgate. A small seaport in Kent, England. 

Isle of Dogs. A peninsula near the mouth of the Thames. 

P. 65. Valclusa Fountain. The fountain of the village of Vau- 
cluse, near Avignon, which was celebrated by the poet Petrarch 
under the Latin form of the name here given. 



SELECTIONS FROM BURNS 



APPENDIX 

Selections from Burns's Poems. 
TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY, 

ON TURNING ONE DOWN WITH THE PLOUGH, 
APRIL, 1786. 

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r, 
Thou's met me in an evil hour ; 
For I maun crush amang the stoure 

Thy slender stem : 
To spare thee now is past my pow'r, • 5 

Thou bonie gem. 

Alas ! it's no thy neebor sweet. 
The bonie lark, companion meet. 
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet 

Wi' spreckl'd breast, 10 

When upward-springing, blythe, to greet 

The purpling east. 

Cauld blew the bitter-biting north 

Upon thy early, humble birth ; 

Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth 15 

Amid the storm. 
Scarce reared above the parent-earth 

Thy tender form. 
85 



86 Selections from Burns. 

The flaunting flow'rs our gardens yield, 

High shelt'ring woods an' wa's maun shield : 20 

But thou, beneath the random bield 

O' clod or stane, 
Adorns the histie stibble-field, 

Unseen, alane. 

There, in thy scanty mantle clad, 25 

Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread. 
Thou lifts thy unassuming head 

In humble guise ; 
But now the share uptears thy bed, 

And low thou lies ! 30 

Such is the fate of artless maid. 
Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade ! 
By love's simplicity betray'd. 

And guileless trust ; 
Till she, like thee, all soil'd, is laid 35 

Low i' the dust. 

Such is the fate of simple Bard, 

On Life's rough ocean luckless starr'd ! 

Unskilful he to note the card 

Of prudent lore, 40 

Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, 

And whelm him o'er ! 

Such fate to suffering Worth is giv'n, 

Who long with wants and woes has striv'n. 

By human pride or cunning driv'n 45 

To mis'ry's brink ; 
Till, wrench'd of ev'ry stay but Heav'n, 

He, ruin'd, sink ! 



To a Mouse. 87 

Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, 

That fate is thine — no distant date ; 60 

Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate, 

Full on thy bloom, 
Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight 

Shall be thy doom ! 



TO A MOUSE, 

ON TURNING HER UP IN HER NEST WITH THE PLOUGH, 
NOVEMBER, 1785. 

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, 
Oh, what a panic's in thy breastie ! 
Thou need na start awa sae hasty 

Wi' bickerin brattle ! 
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee 5 

Wi' murd'rin pattle ! 

I'm truly sorry man's dominion 
Has broken Nature's social union, 
An' justifies that ill opinion 

Which makes thee startle 10 

At me, thy poor earth-born companion, 

An' fellow-mortal ! 

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve : 

What then ? poor beastie, thou maun live ! 

A daimen icker in a thrave 16 

'S a sma' request ; 
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave. 

An' never miss't ! 



88 Selections from Burns. 

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin ! 

Its silly wa's the win's are strewin ! 20 

An' naething, now, to big a new ane, 

O' foggage green ! 
An' bleak December's winds ensuin 
# Baith snell an' keen ! 

Thou saw the fields laid bare and waste, 25 

An' weary winter comin fast, 
An' cozie here, beneath the blast. 

Thou thought to dwell. 
Till crash ! the cruel coulter past 

Out thro' thy cell. 30 

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble 
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble ! 
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble, 

But house or hald. 
To thole the winter's sleety dribble, 35 

An' cranreuch cauld ! 

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane 
In proving foresight may be vain : 
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men 

Gang aft agley, 40 

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain 

For promis'd joy. 

Still thou art blest, compared wi' me ! 

The present only toucheth thee : 

But och ! I backward cast my ee 46 

On prospects drear ! 
An' forward, tho' I canna see, 

I guess an' fear ! 



A Winter Night. 89 

ON SEEING A WOUNDED HARE LIMP BY ME 
WHICH A FELLOW HAD JUST SHOT AT. 

Inhuman man ! Curse on thy barb'rous art, 

And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye ; 

May never pity soothe thee with a sigh, 
Nor never pleasure glad thy cruel heart ! 

Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field, 5 

The bitter little that of life remains ! 

No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains 
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield. 

Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest. 

No more of rest, but now thy dying bed ! 10 

The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head, 

The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest. 

Oft as by winding Nith I, musing, wait 

The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn, 

I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn, 16 

And curse the ruffian's aim, and mourn thy hapless fate. 



A WINTER NIGHT. 

Poor naKed wretches, wheresoe'er you are, 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm ! 
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, 
Your loop'd and window' d raggedness, defend you 
From seasons such as these? 

Shakespeare. 

When biting Boreas, fell and dour. 
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r ; 
When Phoebus gies a short-lived glow'r 
Far south the lift, 



90 Selections from Burns. 

Dim-dark'ning thro' the flaky show'r 
Or whirling drift : 



Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
Poor Labour sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
While burns, wi' snawy wreaths up-chok'd, 

Wild-eddying swirl, 10 

Or, thro' the minjng outlet bock'd, 
Down headlong hurl : 



Listening the doors and winnocks rattle, 

I thought me on the ourie cattle. 

Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 15 

O' winter war. 
An* through the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle 

Beneath a scaur. 



Ilk happin bird — wee, helpless thing ! — 

That in the merry months o' spring 20 

Delighted me to hear thee sing. 

What comes o' thee ? 
Whare wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing 

An' close thy ee? 



Ev'n you on murd'ring errands toil'd, 25 

Lone from your savage homes exil'd, — 
The blood-stain'd roost an' sheep-cote spoil'd 

My heart forgets. 
While pityless the tempest wild 

Sore on you beats ! 30 



A Winter Night. 91 

Now Phoebe, in her midnight reign, 
Dark muffl'd, view'd the dreary plain; 
Still crowding thoughts, a pensive train, 

Rose in my soul, 
When on my ear this plaintive strain, 36 

Slow-solemn, stole : — 

" Blow, blow ye winds with heavier gust ! 

And freeze, thou bitter-biting frost ! 

Descend, ye chilly, smoth'ring snows ! 

Not all your rage, as now united, shows 40 

More hard unkindness, unrelenting. 

Vengeful malice, unrepenting, 
Than heaven-illumin'd Man on brother man bestows I 

" See stern Oppression's iron grip, 

Or mad Ambition's gory hand, 45 

Sending, like blood-hounds from the slip. 
Woe, Want, and Murder o'er a land ! 

Ev'n in the peaceful rural vale. 

Truth, weeping, tells the mournful tale : 
How pamper'd Luxury, Flatt'ry by her side, 60 

The parasite empoisoning her ear, 

With all the servile ^^Tetches in the rear, 
Looks o'er proud Property, extended wide ; 

And eyes the simple, rustic hind. 

Whose toil upholds the glitt'ring show — 66 

A creature of another kind. 

Some coarser substance, unrefin'd — 
Plac'd for her lordly use, thus far, thus vile, below 1 

" Where, where is Love's fond, tender throe, 
With lordly Honour's lofty brow, 60 

The pow'rs you proudly own ? 



92 Selections from Burns. 

Is there, beneath Love's noble name, 
Can harbour, dark, the selfish aim. 

To bless himself alone? 
Mark Maiden-Innocence a prey 65 

To love-pretending snares : 
This boasted Honor turns away, 
Shunning soft Pity's rising sway. 
Regardless of the tears and unavailing pray'rs ! 

Perhaps this hour, in Misery's squalid nest, 70 

She strains your infant to her joyless breast. 
And with a mother's fears shrinks at the rocking blast ! 

" O ye ! who, sunk in beds of down. 

Feel not a want but what yourselves create, 
Think, for a moment, on his wretched fate, 75 

Whom friends and fortune quite disown ! 
lU-satisfy'd keen nature's clam'rous call. 

Stretched on his straw, he lays himself to sleep ; 
While through the ragged roof and chinky wall. 

Chill, o'er his slumbers piles the drifty heap ! 80 

Think on the dungeon's grim confine. 

Where Guilt and poor Misfortune pine ! 

Guilt, erring man, relenting view ! 

But shall thy legal rage pursue 

The wretch, already crushed low 85 

By cruel Fortune's undeserved blow ? 

Affliction's sons are brothers in distress ; 

A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss ! " 



I heard nae mair, for chanticleer 

Shook off the pouthery snaw, 90 

And hailed the morning with a cheer — 

A cottage-rousing craw. 



Salutation to His AuiJ Mare, Maggie. ^^ 

But deep tliis truth iniprcss'd my mind : 

Through all His works abroad, 
The heart l)enev()lent and kind 95 

The most reseml)lcs God. 



THE AULD FAR.MER'S XEW-YEAR MORXIXG 
SALUTATION TO HIS AULD MARE, MAGGIE, 

ON GIVING HER THE ACCUSTOMED RIPP OF CORN TO 
HANSEL IN THE NEW YEAR. 

A GUID New- Year I wish thee, Maggie ! 
Hae, there's a ripp to thy auld baggie : 
Tho' thou's howe-backit now, an' knaggie, 

I've seen the day 
Thou could hae gane like ony staggie 6 

Out-owre the lay. 

Tho' now thou's dowie, stiff, an' crazy, 
An' thy auld hide as white's a daisie, 
I've seen thee dappl't, sleek, an' glaizie, 

A bonie gray : 10 

He should been tight that daur't to raize thee, 

Ance in a day. 

Thou ance was i' the foremost rank, 

A filly buirdly, steeve, an' swank ; 

An' set weel down a shapely shank 15 

As e'er tread yird ; 
An' could hae flown out-owre a stank 

Like ony bird. 

It's now some nine-and-twenty year 

Sin' thou was my guid-father's meere ; 20 



94 Selections from Burns. 

He gied me thee, o' tocher clear, 

An' fifty mark ; 
Tho' it was sma', 't was weel-won gear, 

An' thou was stark. 



When first I gaed to woo my Jenny, 
Ye then was trottin wi' your minnie : 
Tho' ye was trickle, slee and funny. 

Ye ne'er was donsie ; 
But hamely, tawie, quiet an' cannie, 

An' unco sonsie. 

That day ye pranc'd wi' mickle pride, 
When ye bure hame my bonie bride : 
An' sweet an' gracefu' she did ride, 

Wi' maiden air ! 
Kyle-Stewart I could bragged wide 

For sic a pair. 

Tho' now ye dow but hoyte an' hoble 
An' wintle like a saumont-coble. 
That day ye was a j inker noble 

For heels an' win' ! 
An' ran them till they a' did wauble 

Far, far behin' ! 

When thou an' I were young an' skiegh. 

An' stable meals at fairs were driegh, 

How thou wad prance an' snore an' skriegh, 

An' tak' the road ! 
Toun's bodies ran, an' stood abiegh, 

An' ca't thee mad. 



Salutation to His AuJd Mare, Maggie. 95 

When thou was corn't an' I was mellow, 

We took the road ay like a swallow : 50 

At brooses thou had ne'er a fellow 

For pith an' speed ; 
But ev'ry tail thou pay't them hollow, 

Whare'er thou gaed. 

The sma', droop-rumpl't, hunter cattle 55 

Might aiblins waur't thee for a brattle ; 
But sax Scotch mile thou try't their mettle 

An' gart them whaizle : 
Nae whip nor spur, but just a wattle 

O' saugh or hazel. 60 

Thou was a noble fittie-lan' 

As e'er in tug or tow was drawn ! 

Aft thee an' I, in aught hours' gaun 

On guid March-weather, 
Hae turn'd sax rood beside our han' 66 

For days thegither. 

Thou never braing't, an' fetch't, an' flisket, 
But thy auld tail thou wad hae whisket 
An' spread abreed thy weel-fiU'd brisket, 

Wi' pith an' pow'r, 70 

Till spritty knowes wad rair't and risket 

An' slypet owre. 

When frosts lay lang an' snaws were deep 

An' threaten'd labour back to keep, 

I gied thy cog a wee-bit heap 75 

Aboon the timmer : 
I ken'd my Maggie wad na sleep 

For that, or simmer. 



96 Selections from Burns. 

In cart or car thou never reestit ; 

The steyest brae thou wad hae faced it ; 

Thou never lap an' sten't an' breastit, 

Then stood to blaw ; 
But just thy step a wee thing hastit, 

Thou snoov't awa. 

My pleugh is now thy bairn-time a', 
Four gallant brutes as e'er did draw ; 
Forbye sax mae I've sell't awa, 

That thou hast nurst : 
They drew me thretteen pund an' twa, 

The vera warst. 

Mony a sair daurg we twa hae wrought, 
An' wi' the weary warl' fought ! 
An' mony an anxious day I thought 

We wad be beat ! 
Yet here to crazy age we're brought 

Wi' something yet. 

And think na, my auld trusty servan', 
That now, perhaps, thou's less deservin, 
And thy auld days may end in stervin ; 

For my last fou, 
A heapit stimpart, I'll reserve ane, 

Laid by for you. 

We've worn to crazy years thegither ; 
We'll toyte about wi' ane anither ; 
Wi' tentie care I'll flit thy tether 

To some hain'd rig, 
Whare ye may noble rax your leather, 

Wi' sma' fatigue. 



Address to the Deil. 97 

ADDRESS TO THE DEIL. 

O Prince ! O Chief of many throned pow'rs ! 

That led th' embattl'd seraphim to war. — Milton. 

O THOU ! whatever title suit thee, — 
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie — 
Wha in yon cavern, grim an' sootie, 

Clos'd under hatches, 
Spairges about the brunstane cootie 5 

To scaud poor wretches ! 

Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee. 
An* let poor damned bodies be ; 
I'm sure sma' pleasure it can gie, 

E'en to a deil, 10 

To skelp an' scaud poor dogs like me, 

An' hear us squeel ! 

Great is thy pow'r, an' great thy fame ; 

Far ken'd an' noted is thy name ; 

An' tho' yon lowin heugh's thy hame, 15 

Thou travels far ; 
An' faith ! thou's neither lag nor lame, 

Nor blate nor scaur. 



Whyles, rangin like a roarin lion. 

For prey a' holes an' corners tryin ; 20 

Whyles, on the strong-wing'd tempest flyin, 

Tirlin the kirks ; 
Whyles, in the human bosom pryin. 

Unseen thou lurks. 



98 Selections from Burns. 

I've heard my rev'rend grannie say, 25 

In lanely glens ye like to stray ; 
Or whare auld ruin'd castles gray 

Nod to the moon, 
Ye fright the nightly wand'rer's way 

Wi' eldritch croon. 30 

When twilight did my grannie summon 
To say her pray'rs, douce honest woman ! 
Aft yont the dyke she's heard you bummin, 

Wi' eerie drone ; 
Or, rustlin, thro' the boortrees comin, 35 

Wi' heavy groan. 

Ae dreary, windy, winter night, 

The stars shot down wi' sklentin light, 

Wi' you mysel I gat a fright 

Ayont the lough ; 40 

Ye like a rash-buss stood in sight 

Wi' waving sough. 

The cudgel in my nieve did shake, 

Each bristl'd hair stood like a stake, 

When wi' an eldritch, stoor *' Quaick, quaick," 45 

Amang the springs, 
Awa ye squatter'd like a drake, 

On whistlin wings. 

Let warlocks grim, an' wither'd hags 

Tell how wi' you, on ragweed nags 50 

They skim the muirs an' dizzy crags 

Wi' wicked speed ; 
An' in kirk-yards renew their leagues, 

Owre howkit dead. 



Address to the Deil. 99 

Thence, countra wives wi' toil an* pain 55 

May plunge an' plunge the kirn in vain ; 
For O ! the yellow treasure's taen 

By witchin skill ; 
An' dawtit, twal-pint hawkie's gaen 

As yell's the bill. 60 

Thence, mystic knots mak great abuse, 
On young guidmen, fond, keen, an' crouse ; 
When the best wark-lume i' the house. 

By cantrip wit, 
Is instant made no worth a louse, 65 

Just at the bit. 

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord, 
An' float the jinglin icy-boord. 
Then water-kelpies haunt the foord 

By your direction, 70 

An' nighted trav'lers are allur'd 

To their destruction. 

And aft your moss-traversing spunkies 

Decoy the wight that late and drunk is : 

The bleezin, curst, mischievous monkeys 75 

Delude his eyes. 
Till in some miry slough he sunk is. 

Ne'er mair to rise. 

When Masons' mystic word and grip 

In storms an' tempests raise you up, 80 

Some cock or cat your rage maun stop. 

Or, strange to tell. 
The youngest brither ye wad whip 

Aff straught to hell ! 



lOO Selections from Burns. 

Lang syne, in Eden's bonie yard, 85 

When youthfu' lovers first were pair'd, 
And all the soul of love they shar'd. 

The raptur'd hour, 
Sweet on the fragrant flow'ry swaird, 

In shady bow'r : 90 

Then you, ye auld sneck-drawin dog ! 

Ye cam to Paradise incog. 

And play'd on man a cursed brogue, 

(Black be your fa' !) 
And gied the infant warld a shog, 95 

Maist ruin'd a'. 

D'ye mind that day when in a bizz, 
Wi' reeket duds and reestit gizz, 
Ye did present your smoutie phiz 

Mang better folk, 100 

An' sklented on the man of Uz 

Your spitefu' joke? 

An' how ye gat him i' your thrall, 

An' brak him out o' house and hall. 

While scabs and blotches did him gall, 105 

Wi' bitter claw ; 
An' lows'd his ill-tongued, wicked scaul 

Was warst ava? 

But a' your doings to rehearse. 

Your wily snares an' fechtin fierce, IIO 

Sin' that day Michael did you pierce, 

Down to this time. 
Wad ding a Lallan tongue, or Erse, 

In prose or rhyme. 



Scots Wha Hae. loi 

An' now, Auld Cloots, I ken ye're thinkin, 115 

A certain Bardie's rantin, drinkin, 
Some luckless hour will send him linkin, 

To your black Pit ; 
But faith ! he'll turn a corner jinkin, 

An' cheat you yet. 120 

But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ! 
O wad ye tak a thought an' men' ! 
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — 

Still hae a stake : 
I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 125 

Ev'n for your sake ! 



SCOTS WHA HAE. 

Tune, Ilcy, Tutti Taitie, 

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, 
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led ; 
Welcome to your gory bed, 
Or to victory ! 

Now's the day, and now's the hour ; 6 

See the front o' battle lour ; 
See approach proud Edward's power — 
Chains and slavery ! 

WTia will be a traitor knave ? 
Wha can fill a coward's grave ? 10 

Wha sae base as be a slave ? 
Let him turn and flee ! 



I02 Selections from Burns. 

Wha for Scotland's King and Law 
Freedom's sword will strongly draw, 
Freeman stand, or Freeman fa', 15 

Let him follow me ! 

By Oppression's woes and pains ! 
By your sons in servile chains ! 
We will drain our dearest veins, 

But they shall be free ! 20 

Lay the proud usurpers low ! 
Tyrants fall in every foe ! 
Liberty's in every blow ! — 
Let'US do, or die ! 



M'PHERSON'S FAREWELL. 

Tune, '' M'Pherson's RanC 

Farewell, ye dungeons dark and strong, 

The wretch's destinie ! 
M'Pherson's time will not be long 

On yonder gallows-tree. 

JHORUS. — Sae rantinly, sae wantonly, 6 

Sae dauntinly gaed he ; 
He play'd a spring, and danc'd it round, 
Below the gallows-tree. 

O what is death but parting breath ? — 

On monie a bloody plain 10 

I've dar'd his face, and in this place 
I scorn him yet again ! 



Poor Maille's Elegy. loj 

Untie these bands from off my hands 

And bring to me my sword, 
And there's no man in all Scotland, 16 

But I'll brave him at a word. 

I've liv'd a life of sturt and strife ; 

I die by treacherie : 
It burns my heart I must depart 

And not avenged be. 20 

Now farewell light, thou sunshine bright, 

And all beneath the sky ! 
May coward shame distain his name, 

The wretch that dare not die ! 



POOR MAILIE'S ELEGY. 

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose, 
Wi' saut tears tricklin doun your nose ; 
Our Bardie's fate is at a close. 

Past a' remead ; 
The last, sad cape-stane o' his woe*s — 5 

Poor Mailie's dead ! 

It's no the loss o' warl's gear, 
That could sae bitter draw the tear. 
Or mak our Bardie, dowie, wear 

The mournin weed : 10 

He's lost a friend and neebor dear. 

In Mailie dead. 

Thro' a' the toun she trotted by him ; 

A lang half-mile she could descry him ; 

Wi' kindly bleat, when she did spy him, 15 



104 Selections from Burns. 

She ran wi' speed : 
A friend mair faithf u' ne'er cam nigh him, 
Than MaiHe dead. 



I wat she was a sheep o' sense, 

An' could behave hersel wi' mense ; 20 

I'll say't, she never brak a fence. 

Thro' thievish greed. 
Our Bardie, lanely, keeps the spence 

Sin' Mailie's dead. 



Or, if he wanders up the howe, 25 

Her livin image in her yowe 

Comes bleatin till him, owre the knowe, 

For bits o' bread ; 
An' down the briny pearls rowe 

For Mailie dead. 30 



She was nae get o' moorlan' tips, 

Wi' tawted ket, an' hairy hips ; 

For her forbears were brought in ships, 

Frae yont the Tweed : 
A bonier fleesh ne'er cross'd the clips 35 

Than Mailie's dead. 



Wae worth the man wha first did shape 
That vile, wanchanciptlTingr^=^ a rape ! 
It makes guid fellows girn an' gape, 

Wi' chokin dread ; 40 

An' Robin's bonnet wave wi' crape. 

For Mailie dead. 



Tarn o' Shanter. 105 

O a' ye Bards on bonie Doon ! 

An' wha on Ayr your chanters tune ! 

Come, join the melancholious croon 45 

O' Robin's reed ! 
His heart will never get aboon — 

His Mailie's dead ! 



TAM O' SHANTER. 

A TALE. 

Of Brownyis and of Bogillis full is this Buke. — Gawin Douglas. 

When chapman billies leave the street, 
And drouthy neebors neebors meet. 
As market-days are wearing late, 
And folk begin to tak the gate ; 

While we sit bousin at the nappy, 5 

And gettin fou and unco happy, 
We think na on the lang Scots miles, 
The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles, 
That lie between us and our hame, 
Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame, 10 

Gathering her brows like gathering storm. 
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm. 

This truth fand honest Tam o' Shanter, 
As he frae Ayr ae night did canter : 
(Auld Ayr, wham ne'er a town surpasses 15 

For honest men and bonie lasses.) 

Tam ! had'st thou but been sae wise 
As taen thy ain wife Kate's advice ! 
She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum, 



io6 Selections from Burns. 

A bletherin, blusterin, drunken blellum ; 20 

That frae November till October, 

Ae market-day thou was na sober ; 

That ilka melder wi' the miller, 

Thou sat as lang as thou had siller ; 

That ev'ry naig was caM a shoe on, 25 

The smith and thee gat roarin fou on ; 

That at the Lord's house, ev'n on Sunday, 

Thou drank wi' Kirkton Jean till Monday. 

She prophesied, that, late or soon, 

Thou would be found deep drown 'd in Doon, 30 

Or catch't wi' warlocks in the mirk. 

By AUoway's auld haunted kirk. 



Ah, gentle dames ! it gars me greet, 
To think how monie counsels sweet. 
How monie lengthen'd sage advices, 35 

The husband frae the wife despises ! 



But to our tale : — Ae market night, 
Tam had got planted unco right, 
Fast by an ingle, bleezin finely, 

Wi' reamin swats that drank divinely ; 40 

And at his elbow, Souter Johnie, 
His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony : 
Tam lo'ed him like a vera brither ; 
They had been fou for weeks thegither. 
The night drave on wi' sangs and clatter ; 45 

And ay the ale was growing better : 
The landlady and Tam grew gracious 
Wi' secret favours, sweet, and precious : 
The souter tauld his queerest stories ; 



Tarn o' Shanter. 107 

The landlord's laugh was ready chorus : 60 

The storm without might rair and rustle, 
Tarn did na mind the storm a whistle. 



Care, mad to see a man sae happy. 
E'en drown'd himsel amang the nappy : 
As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure, 55 

The minutes wing'd their way wi' pleasure ; 
Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious, 
O'er a' the ills o' life victorious ! 



But pleasures are like poppies spread, 
You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed ; 60 

Or like the snow falls in the river, 
A moment white — then melts for ever ; 
Or like the borealis race. 
That flit ere you can point their place ; 
Or like the rainbow's lovely form 65 

Evanishing amid the storm. 
Nae man can tether time or tide : 
The hour approaches Tam maun ride : — 
That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane, 
That dreary hour he mounts his beast in ; 70 

And sic a night he taks the road in. 
As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in. 



The wind blew as 't wad blawn its last ; 
The rattling show'rs rose on the blast ; 
The speedy gleams the darkness swallow 'd; 75 

Loud, deep, and lang the thunder bellow'd : 
That night, a child might understand, 
The Deil had business on his hand. 



io8 Selections from Burns. 

Weel mounted on his gray mear, Meg, 
A better never lifted leg, 80 

Tarn skelpit on thro' dub and mire, 
Despising wind and rain and fire ; 
Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet, 
Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet, 
Whiles glowrin round wi' prudent cares, 85 

Lest bogles catch him unawares : 
Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, 
Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry. 

By this time he was cross the ford, 
Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor'd ; 90 

And past the birks and meikle stane, 
Whare drucken Charlie brak's neck-bane ; 
And thro' the whins, and by the cairn, 
Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn ; 
And near the thorn, aboon the well, 95 

Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel. 
Before him Doon pours all his floods ; 
The doubling storm roars thro' the woods ; 
The lightnings flash from pole to pole, 
Near and more near the thunders roll ; 100 

When, glimmering thro' the groaning trees, 
Kirk-Alloway seemed in a bleeze ; 
Thro' ilka bore the beams were glancing. 
And loud resounded mirth and dancing. 

Inspiring bold John Barleycorn ! 105 

What dangers thou can'st make us scorn ! 
Wi' tippenny we fear nae evil ; 
Wi' usquebae we'll face the Devil ! 
The swats sae ream'd in Tammie's noddle. 
Fair play, he car'd na deils a boddle, 110 



Tarn o' Shanter. 109 

But Maggie stood, right sair astonish 'd, 
Till, by the heel and hand admonish'd, 
She ventur'd forward on the light ; 
And, wow ! Tam saw an unco sight ! 



Warlocks and witches in a dance ; 115 

Nae cotillion brent-new frae France, 
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels 
Put life and mettle in their heels : 
A winnock-bunker in the east, 

There sat Auld Nick, in shape o' beast ; 120 

A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large. 
To gie them music was his charge ; 
He screw'd the pipes and gart them skirl. 
Till roof and rafters a' did dirl. — 
Coffins stood round like open presses, 125 

That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses ; 
And by some devilish cantraip sleight 
Each in its cauld hand held a light, 
By which heroic Tam was able 

To note upon the haly table 130 

A murderer's banes in gibbet aims ; 
Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns ; 
A thief, new-cutted frae the rape — 
Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape ; 
Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted ; 135 

Five scymitars, wi' murder crusted ; 
A garter, which a babe had strangled ; 
A knife, a father's throat had mangled, 
Whom his ain son o' life bereft — 
The gray hairs yet stack to the heft ; 140 

Wi* mair o' horrible and awfu'. 
Which ev'n to name wad be unlawfu*. 



iio Selections from Burns. 

As Tammie glowr'd, amaz'd and curious, 
The mirth and fun grew fast and furious : 
The piper loud and louder blew, 145 

The dancers quick and quicker flew ; 
They reel'd, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit. 
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit 
And coost her duddies to the wark 
And linket at it in her sark ! 150 

Now Tam, O Tarn ! had thae been queans, 
A' plump and strapping in their teens ! 
Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen, 
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder Hnen ! — 
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair, 155 

That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair, 
I wad hae gien them aff my hurdies. 
For ae blink o' the bonie burdies ! 

But wither'd beldams, auld and droll, 
Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal, 160 

Lowping and flinging on a crummock, 
I wonder didna turn thy stomach. 

But Tam ken'd what was what fu' brawlie; 
There was ae winsome wench and walie. 
That night enlisted in the core 165 

(Lang after ken'd on Carrick shore : 
For mony a beast to dead she shot. 
And perish'd mony a bonie boat. 
And shook baith meikle corn and ])ear, 
And kept the country-side in fear) ; 170 

Her cutty sark o' Paisley harn. 
That while a lassie she had worn, 



Tani o' Shanter. 1 1 1 

In longitude tho' sorely scanty, 

It was her best, and she was vauntie. 

Ah ! little kent thy reverend grannie, 175 

That sark she coft for her wee Nannie, 

Wi' twa j)und Scots ('twas a' her riches), 

Wad ever graced a dance o' witches ! 

But here my Muse her wing maun cour, 
Sic flights are far beyond her pow'r ; 180 

To sing how Nannie lap and fiang, 
(A souple jad she was and Strang,) 
And how Tam stood like ane bewitch'd. 
And thought his very een enrich'd ; 
Even Satan glowr'd and fidg'd fu' fain, 185 

And hotch'd and blew wi' might and main : 
Till first ae caper, syne anither, 
Tam tint his reason a' thegither, 
And roars out, " Weel done, Cutty-sark ! " 
And in an instant all was dark : 190 

And scarcely had he Maggie rallied. 
When out the hellish legion sallied. 

As bees bizz out wi' angry fyke. 
When plundering herds assail their byke ; 
As open pussie's mortal foes, 195 

When, pop ! she starts before their nose ; 
As eager runs the market-crowd. 
When " Catch the thief ! " resounds aloud; 
So Maggie runs, the witches follow, 
Wi' mony an eldritch skriech and hollo. 200 

Ah, Tam ! ah, Tam ! thou'll get thy fairin 1 
In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin ! 
In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin ! 



Ill Selections from Burns. 

Kate soon will be a woefu' woman ! 

Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg, 205 

And win the key-stane of the brig : 

There at them thou thy tail may toss, . 

A running stream they dare na cross. 

But ere the key-stane she could make, 

The fient a tail she had to shake ! 210 

For Nannie, far before the rest. 

Hard upon noble Maggie prest, 

And flew at Tam wi' furious ettle ; 

But little wist she Maggie's mettle — 

Ae spring brought aff her master hale, 215 

But left behind her ain gray tail : 

The carlin claught her by the rump. 

And left poor Maggie scarce a stump. 

Now, wha this tale o' truth shall read, 
Ilk man and mother's son, take heed, 220 

Whene'er to drink you are inclin'd, 
Or cutty -sarks run in your mind, 
Think, ye may buy the joys owre dear : 
Remember Tam o' Shanter's mear. 



TO MARY IN HEAVEN. 

Thou ling'ring star with less'ning ray. 

That lov'st to greet the early morn, 
Again thou usher'st in the day 

My Mary from my soul was torn. 
O Mary ! dear departed shade ! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest? 
See'st thou thy lover lowly laid ? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast? 



Auld Lang Syne. 1 13 

That sacred hour can I forget, 

Can I forget the hallowed grove, 10 

Where by the winding Ayr we met 

To live one day of parting love ? 
Eternity will not efface 

Those records dear of transports past. 
Thy image at our last embrace — 15 

Ah ! little thought we 'twas our last ! 

Ayr, gurgling, kiss'd his pebbl'd shore, 

O'erhung with wild woods, thick'ning green ; 
The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar 

Twin'd amorous round the raptur'd scene : 20 

The flow'rs sprang wanton to be prest. 

The birds sang love on every spray. 
Till too, too soon the glowing West 

Proclaim'd the speed of winged day. 

Still o'er these scenes my mem'ry wakes, 25 

And fondly broods wath miser-care ! 
Time but th' impression stronger makes, 

As streams their channels deeper wear. 
My Mary, dear departed shade ! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest? 30 

See'st thou thy lover lowly laid ? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast? 



AULD LANG SYNE. 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot. 
And never brought to min' ? 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
And auld lang syne ? 



114 Selections from Burns. 

CHORUS. — For auld lang syne, my dear, £ 

For auld lang syne, 
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet 
For auld lang syne ! 

And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp, 

And surely Fll be mine ! 10 

And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet 

For auld lang syne ! 

We twa hae run about the braes, 

And pu'd the gowans fine ; 
But we've wander'd monie a weary fit, 15 

Sin' auld lang syne ! 

We twa hae paidl't i' the burn. 

From morning sun till dine ; 
But seas between us braid hae roar'd, 

Sin' auld lang syne ! 20 

And there's a hand, my trusty fier. 

And gie's a hand o' thine ; 
And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught 

For auld lang syne ! 



OF A' THE AIRTS THE WIND CAN BLAW. 

Of a' the airts the wind can blaw 

I dearly like the west, 
For there the bonie lassie lives, 

The lassie I lo'e best : 



Duncan Gray. 115 

There's wild woods grow an' rivers row, 5 

An' mony a bill between ; 
But day and ni<,dit my fancy's flight 

Is ever \vi niv Jean. 



I see her in the dewy flow'rs, 

I see her sweet an' fair : 10 

I hear her in the tunefu' birds, 

I hear her charm the air : 
There's not a bonie flow'r that springs 

By fountain, shaw, or green ; 
There's not a bonie bird that sings, 15 

But minds me o' my Jean. 



DUNCAN GRAY. 

Duncan Gray cam here to woo. 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 
On blythe Yule-night when we were fou, 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 
Maggie coost her head fu hiegh, 6 

Look'd asklent and unco skiegh, 
Gart poor Duncan stand abiegh ; 

Ha, ha, the w^ooin o't ! 

Duncan fleech'd, and Duncan pray'd ; 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 10 

Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig, 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 
Duncan sigh'd baith out and in, 
Grat his een baith bleer't and blin', 
Spak o' lowpin owre a linn ; ]5 

Ha, ha, the w^ooin o't I 



ii6 Selections from Burns. 

Time and chance are but a tide, 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 
Slighted love is sair to bide, 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 20 

" Shall I, like a fool," quoth he, 
" For a haughty hizzie die ? 
She may gae to — France for me ! " 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 

How it comes let doctors tell, 25 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 
Meg grew sick as he grew hale. 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 
Something in her bosom wrings, 
For relief a sigh she brings ; 30 

And O ! her een, they spak sic things ! 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 

Duncan was a lad o' grace, 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 
Maggie's was a piteous case, 35 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 
Duncan could na be her death, 
Swelling pity smoor'd his wrath ; 
Now they're crouse and cantie baith ; 

Ha, ha, the wooin o't ! 40 



Answer to Verses. 117 

ANSWER TO VERSES ADDRESSED TO THE 
POET 

BY THE QUID WIFE OF WAUCHOPE-HOUSE. 
GuiDWIFE, 

I mind it weel, in early date, 

When I was beardless, young, and blate, 

An' first could thresh the barn, 
Or haud a yokin at the pleugh. 
An' tho' forfoughten sair eneugh, 5 

Yet unco proud to learn : 
When first amang the yellow corn 

A man I reckon'd was. 
And wi' the lave ilk merry morn 

Could rank my rig and lass 10 

Still shearing, and clearing 

The tither stooked raw, 
Wi' claivers an' haivers 
Wearing the day awa : 



Ev'n then a wish (I mind its power), 15 

A wish that to my latest hour 

Shall strongly heave my breast ; 
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake 
Some usefu' plan or book could make. 

Or sing a sang at least. 20 

The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 
I turn'd the weeder-clips aside 

An* spar'd the symbol dear : 

No nation, no station 25 

My envy e'er could raise ; 



ii8 Selections from Burns. 

A Scot still, but blot still, 
I knew nae higher praise. 



But still the elements o' sang 

In formless jumble, right an' wrang, 30 

Wild floated in my brain ; 
Till on that hairst I said before, 
My partner in the merry core, 

She rous'd the forming strain : 
I see her yet, the sonsie quean, 35 

That lighted up my jingle. 
Her witching smile, her pauky een, 
That gart my heart-strings tingle ; 
I fired, inspired, 

At ev'ry kindling keek, 40 

But bashing, and dashing, 
I feared aye to speak. 



Hale to the sex ! ilk guid chiel says, 
Wi' merry dance on winter days. 

An' we to share in common : 45 

The gust o' joy, the balm of woe. 
The saul o' life, the heav'n below. 

Is rapture-giving Woman. 
Ye surly sumphs, who hate the name. 

Be mindfu' o' your mither: 50 

She, honest woman, may think shame 
That ye're connected with her. 
Ye're wae men, ye're nae men, 
That slight the lovely dears ; 
To shame ye, disclaim ye, 55 

Ilk honest birkie swears. 



Song, — Mary Morison. 119 

For you, no bred to barn and byre, 
Wlia sweetly tune the Scottish lyre, 

Thanks to you for your line : 
The marled plaid ye kindly spare, 60 

By me should gratefully be ware ; 

'Twad please me to the nine, 
I'd be more vauntie o' my hap, 

Douce hingin oA\Te my curple. 
Than ony ermine ever lap, 65 

Or proud imperial purple. 

Farewell then, lang hale then. 

An' plenty be your fa' : 
May losses and crosses 

Ne'er at your hallan ca' ! 70 



SONG, — MARY MORISON. 

Mary, at thy wandow be. 

It is the wish'd, the trysted hour ! 
Those smiles and glances let me see. 

That makes the miser's treasure poor : 
How blythely wad I bide the stoure, 5 

A weary slave frae sun to sun. 
Could I the rich reward secure. 

The lovely Mary Morison. 

Yestreen when to the trembling string 
The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha', 10 

To thee my fancy took its wing, 
I sat, but neither heard nor saw : 

Tho' this was fair, and that was braw, 
And yon the toast of a' the town, 

1 sigh'd, and said amang them a', 15 

" Ye are na Mary Morison ! " 



120 Selections from Burns. 

O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace 

Wha for thy sake wad gladly die ? 
Or canst thou break that heart of his, 

Whase only f aut is loving thee ? 
If love for love thou wilt na gie 

At least be pity to me shown : 
A thought ungentle canna be 

The thought o' Mary Morison. 



JOHN ANDERSON MY JO. 

John Anderson my jo, John, 

When we were first acquent. 
Your locks were like the raven. 

Your bonie brow was brent ; 
But now your brow is beld, John, 

Your locks are like the snaw ; 
But blessings on your frosty pow, 

John Anderson my jo. 

John Anderson my jo, John, 

We clamb the hill thegither ; 
And monie a cantie day, John, 

We've had wi' ane anither : 
Now we maun totter down, John, 

And hand in hand we'll go. 
And sleep thegither at the foot, 

John Anderson my jo. 



Flow Gently, Sweet Afton. 121 

THE BANKS O' DOON. 
Tune — " The Caledonian Hunt's Delight:' 

Ye banks and braes o' bonie Doon, 

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair ? 
How can ye chant, ye little birds, 

And I sae weary fu' o' care ! 
Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird, 5 

That wantons thro' the flowering thorn : 
Thou minds me o' departed joys, 

Departed — never to return. 

Aft hae I rov'd by bonie Doon, 

To see the rose and woodbine twinie ; 10 

And ilka bird sang o' its Luve, 

And fondly sae did I o' mine ; 
Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, 

Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree I 
And my fause Luver staw my rose, — 16 

But ah ! he left the thorn wi' me. 



FLOW GENTLY, SWEET AFTON. 

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes ! 
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise ; 
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, — 
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream ! 

Thou stock-dove whose echo resounds thro' the glen, 
Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den. 
Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear, - 
I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair. 



122 Selections from Burns. 

How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills, 

Far mark'd with the courses of clear winding rills ; 10 

There daily I wander as noon rises high, 

My flocks and my Mary's sweet cot in my eye. 

How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, 
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow ; 
There oft, as mild Evening weeps over the lea, 15 

The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me. 

Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides, 

And winds by the cot where my Mary resides ; 

How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave. 

As gath'ring sweet flow'rets she stems thy clear wave. 20 

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among th^^ green braes ! 
Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays ; 
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, 
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream ! 



A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT. 

Is there, for honest poverty. 

That hings his head, an' a' that? 
The coward slave, we pass him by — 
We dare be poor for a' that ! 

For a' that, an' a' that, 5 

Our toils obscure, an' a' that ; 
The rank is but the guinea's stamp ; 
The man's the gowd for a' that. 

What tho' on hamely fare we dine. 

Wear hodden-gray, an' a' that ; lO 



A Man's a Man for A' That. 123 

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine — 
A man's a man for a' that. 
For a' that, an' a' that, 

Their tinsel show, an' a' that ; 
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, 15 

Is king o' men for a' that. 

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd " a lord," 

Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that ; 
Tho' hundreds worship at his word, 

He's but a coof for a' that : . 20 

For a' that, an' a' that, 

His riband, star, an' a' that, 
The man o' independent mind — 
He looks and laughs at a' that. 

A prince can mak a l3elted knight, 25 

A marquis, duke, an' a' that ; 
But an honest man's aboon his might, 
Guid faith he mauna fa' that ! 
For a' that, an' a' that. 

Their dignities, an' a' that, 30 

The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth. 
Are higher rank than a' that. 

Then let us pra\^ that come it may. 

As come it will for a' that, 
That sense and w^orth, o'er a' the earth, 35 

May bear the gree, an' a' that. 
For a' that, an' a' that, 

It's coming yet, for a' that, 
That man to man, the warld o'er, 

Shall brothers be for a' that. 40 



124 Selections from Burns. 

O, WERT THOU IN THE CAULD BLAST. 

O, WERT thou in the cauld blast, 

On yonder lea, on yonder lea, 
My plaidie to the angry airt, 

I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee. 
Or did misfortune's bitter storms 5 

Around thee blaw, around thee blaw, 
Thy bield should be my bosom, 

To share it a', to share it a'. 

Or were I in the wildest waste, 

Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, 10 

The desert were a paradise. 

If thou wert there, if thou wert there. 
Or were I monarch o' the globe, 

Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign. 
The brightest jewel in my crown 15 

Wad be my queen, wad be my queen. 



THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT. 

INSCRIBED TO ROBERT AIKEN, ESQ. 

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, 
Their homely joys and destiny obscure; 

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile, 

The short and simple annals of the poor. — Gray. 

My lov'd, my honour'd, much respected friend ! 

No mercenary bard his homage pays ; 
With honest pride, I scorn each selfish end : 

My dearest meed a friend's esteem and praise. 

To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays. 
The lowly train in life's sequester'd scene ; 

The native feelings strong, the guileless ways; 



The Cotter's Saturchiy Night. 125 

What Aiken in a cottage would have heen ; 
Ah ! tho' his worth unknown, far happier there, I ween ! 

November chill hlaws loud wi' angry sugh, 10 

The short'ning winter day is near a close; 
The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh, 

The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose ; 

The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes, — 
This night his weekly moil is at an end, — 15 

Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes. 
Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend. 
And weary, o'er the moor, his course does hameward bend. 

At length his lonely cot appears in view, 

Beneath the shelter of an aged tree ; 20 

Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through 

To meet their dad, wi' flichterin noise an' glee. 

His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie. 
His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty w^fie's smile, 

The lisping infant prattling on his knee, 25 

Does a' his weary kiaugh and care beguile, 
An' makes him quite forget his labour an' his toil. 

Belyve, the elder bairns come drappin in, 

At service out amang the farmers roun' ; 
Some ca the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin 30 

A cannie errand to a neibor toun : 

Their eldest hope, their Jenny, w^oman-grown, 
In youthfu' bloom, love sparkling in her ee. 

Comes hame, perhaps to shew a braw new gown, 
Or deposite her sair-won penny fee, 35 

To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be. 

With joy unfeign'd brothers and sisters meet, 
An' each for other's weelfare kindly spiers : 



126 Selections from Burns. 

The social hours, swift-wing'd, unnotic'd fleet ; 

Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears. 40 

The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years ; 

Anticipation forward points the view ; 
The mother, wi' her needle an' her sheers, 

Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new ; 
The father mixes a' wi' admonition due. 45 

Their master's an' their mistress's command 

The younkers a' are warned to obey ; 
An' mind their labours wi' an eydent hand. 

An' ne'er , tho' out o' sight, to jauk or play : 

** An' O ! be sure to fear the Lord alway, 50 

An' mind your duty, duly, morn an' night ! 

Lest in temptation's path ye gang astray, 
Implore His counsel and assisting might : 
They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright ! " 

But hark ! a rap comes gently to the door. 55 

Jenny, wha kens the meaning o' the same, 
Tells how a neebor lad cam o'er the moor, 

To do some errands, and convoy her hame. 

The wily mother sees the conscious flame 
Sparkle in Jenny's ee, and flush her cheek ; 60 

Wi' heart-struck, anxious care, inquires his name, 
While Jenny hafflins is afraid to speak ; 
Weel pleas'd the mother hears it's nae wild worthless rake. 

Wi' kindly welcome Jenny brings him ben, 

A strappin youth ; he takes the mother's eye ; 65 

Blythe Jenny sees the visit's no ill taen ; 

The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and kye. 

The youngster's artless heart o'erflows wi' joy. 



The Cotter's Saturday Night. 127 

But, blate and laithfu', scarce can wool })ehave; 

The mother wi' a woman's wiles can spy 70 

What maks the youth sae bashfu' an' sae grave, 
\Yeel-pleas'd to think her bairn's respected h'ke the lave. 

O happy love ! where love like this is found ! 

O heart-felt raptures ! bliss beyond compare ! 
I've paced much this weary, mortal round, 75 

And sage experience bids me this declare — 

'* If Heav'n a draught of heav'nly pleasure spare, 
One cordial in this melancholy vale, 

'Tis when a youthful, loving, modest pair, 
In other's arms breathe out the tender tale, 80 

Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the ev'ning gale." 

Is there, in human form, that bears a heart, 
A wretch ! a villain ! lost to love and truth ! 

That can \Wth studied, sly, ensnaring art 

Betray sweet Jenny's unsuspecting youth ? 85 

Curse on his perjur'd arts ! dissembling smooth ! 

Are honour, virtue, conscience, all exil'd ? 
Is there no pity, no relenting ruth. 

Points to the parents fondling o'er their child. 
Then paints the ruin'd maid, and their distraction wild? 90 

But now the supper crowns their simple board, 

The halesome parritch, chief of Scotia's food ; 
The sowpe their only hawkie does afford. 

That yont the hallan snugly chows her cud. 

The dame brings forth, in complimental mood, 95 

To grace the lad, her weel-hain'd kebbuck fell. 

An' aft he's prest, an' aft he ca's it guid ; 
The frugal wifie, garrulous, will tell, 
How 'twas a towmond auld, sin' lint was i' the bell. 



128 Selections from Burns. 

The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face, 100 

They round the ingle form a circle wide ; 
The sire turns o'er with patriarchal grace 

The big ha'-bible, ance his father's pride ; 

His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside, 
His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare ; 105 

Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide. 
He wales a portion with judicious care ; 
And, " Let us worship God," he says with solemn air. 

They chant their artless notes in simple guise ; 

They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim : iio 

Perhaps Dundee's wild-warbling measures rise, 

Or plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name. 

Or noble Elgin beets the heaven-ward flame. 
The sweetest far of Scotia's holy lays. 

Compar'd with these, Italian trills are tame ; 115 

The tickl'd ear no heart-felt raptures raise ; 
Nae unison hae they with our Creator's praise. 

The priest-like father reads the sacred page, — 

How Abram was the friend of God on high ; 
Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage 120 

With Amalek's ungracious progeny ; 

Or how the royal bard did groaning lie 
Beneath the stroke of heaven's avenging ire ; 

Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry ; 
Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire ; 125 

Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre. 

Perhaps the Christian volume is the theme, — 
How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed ; 

How He, who bore in Heav'n the second name. 

Had not on earth whereon to lay His head : 130 



The Cotter's Saturday Night. i2<y 

How His first followers and servants sped ; 
The precepts sage they wrote to many a land : 

How he, who lone in Patmos hanished, 
Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand, 
And heard great Bab'lon's doom pronounc'd by Heav'n's 



command. 



Ic 



Then kneeling down to Heav'n's eternal KiN(i, 
The saint, the father, and the husband prays : 

Hope " springs exulting on triumphant wing," 
That thus they all shall meet in future days : 
There ever bask in uncreated rays, 140 

No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear. 
Together hymning their Creator's praise, 

In such society, yet still more dear. 
While circling Time moves round in an eternal sphere. 

Compar'd with this, how poor Religion's pride 145 

In all the pomp of method and of art. 
When men display to congregations wide 

Devotion's ev'ry grace except the heart ! 

The Pow'r, incens'd, the pageant will desert; 
The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole ; 150 ** 

But haply in some cottage far apart 
May hear, well pleased, the language of the soul, 
And in His book of life the inmates poor enrol. 

Then homeward all take off their sev'ral way ; 

The youngling cottagers retire to rest ; 155 

The parent-pair their secret homage pay, 

And proffer up to Heav'n the warm request, 

That He, who stills the raven's clam'rous nest 
And decks the lily fair in fiow'ry pride. 

Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best, 160 



130 Selections from Burns. 

For them and for their little ones provide ; 
But chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside. 

From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs, 
That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad : 

Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, 165 

" An honest man's the noblest work of God " : 
And certes, in fair Virtue's heavenly road. 

The cottage leaves the palace far behind : 

What is a lordling's pomp ? a cumbrous load, 

Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, 170 

Studied in arts of hell, in wickedness refin'd ! 

O Scotia ! my dear, my native soil ! 

For whom my warmest wish to Heav'n is sent! 
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil 

Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content ! 175 

And, oh ! may Heav'n their simple lives prevent 
From luxury's contagion, weak and vile ! 

Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent, 
A virtuous populace may rise the while, 
And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov'd isle. 180 

O Thou ! who pour'd the patriotic tide 

That stream'd thro' Wallace's undaunted heart, 

Who dar'd to nobly stem tyrannic pride, 
Or nobly die, the second glorious part, — 
(The patriot's God peculiarly thou art, 185 

His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward !) 
O never, never Scotia's realm desert, 

But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard. 
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard ! 



GLOSSARY. 



a', all. 

abiegh. aloof, 
aboon, above. 
ae, one. 
aff, oflf. 
aft, often, 
agley, amiss. 
ahint, behind. 
aiblins, perhaps. 
ain, own. 
aim, iron, 
airt, direction, 
alane, alone. 
amaist, almost. 
amang, among. 
ance, once. 
ane, one. 
asklent, aslant, 
auld, old. 
ava, of all, at all. 
awa, away, gone, 
ayont, beyond. 

baggie, stomach. 
baillie, bailie, magistrate. 
baim, child. 
baim-time, offspring. 
baith, both. 
bane, bone. 
bashing, abashing. 
bauld, bold, 
bear, barley. 
beet, kindle, 
belyve, presently. 
bicker, a short run. 
bield, shelter. 



big, v., build. 
biU, buU. 

billie, fellow, comrade, 
bing, heap. 
birk, birch. 
birkie, fine fellow. 
bizz, flurry. 
blate, shy, modest, 
blaw, blow, 
blellum, babbler, 
blethers, nonsense. 
blink, glance, glimpse. 
bluid, blood. 
bock, pour forth, 
boddle, farthing, 
bogle, bogie, goblin. 
bonnie, bonie, winsome, 
boortree, elder-tree, 
bore, crevice. 

bouse, to drink hard, to " booze.' 
brae, slope, small hill, 
braingt, plunged. 
brak, broke. 

brattle, scamper ; clatter, 
braw, fine, handsome, 
breastit, sprang forward, 
breeks, breeches. 
brent-new, brand-new. 
brig, bridge. 
brogue, trick. 
broose, race, 
buirdly, stalwart, 
bunker, bench, 
burdie, maiden, lass, 
bure, v., bore, 
bum, brook. 
131 



132 



Selections from Burns. 



buss, bush. 
but, outside. 

cantie, cheerful, 
capestane, capstone, 
card, chart. 
carlin, old woman, 
chanter, bagpipe, 
claes, clothes. 

cog, 1)0 wl. 

coof, cuif, fool. 
cranreuch, hoarfrost. 
craw, crow, 
crazy, infirm, 
creeshie, greasy. 
crummock, hooked staff. 
curple, crupper, 
cutty, short. 

daimen icker, occasional ear 

(of grain). 
daurg, darg, day's work, 
daut, fondle, 
dee, die. 

deevil, de'il, devil. 
den, cavern. 

dike, dyke, stone or turf fence. 
ding, knock. 
dirl, vibrate, ring, 
donsie, wicked. 
douce, sedate, prudent. 
dour, stubborn ; stern. 
dowie, low-spirited. 
dree, endure, suffer. 
driegh, dull. 
drouthy, thirsty. 
drucken, drunken. 
duds, duddies, ragged clothes. 

ee, eye; pL, een. 
eldritch, unearthly. 
eneuch, enough. 
Erse, Gaelic, 
ettle, aim. 
eydent, diligent. 



fae, n., destiny; v., befall. 

fand, found. 

fecht, fight. 

fidgin-fain, fidgeting with pleasure. 

fient, fiend. 

fittie-lan, plough-horse (fit-the- 

land). 
flee, fly. 
flannen, flannel. 
fleech, coax, flatter. 
fleesh, fleece. 
flichter, flutter. 
fliskit, capered, 
flit, to shift. 
foggage, rank grass. 
forbye, besides. 
forfoughten, tired out. 
fou, adj., full, drunk; n., a full 

measure. 
frae, from, 
fyke, fike, fuss. 

gae, gang, go. 

gar, compel. 

gate, road, way, manner. 

gaun, going. 

gear, goods, wealth. 

get, n., offspring. 

ghaist, ghost. 

gie, give. 

gif, if. 

gin, if (hard g). 

girn, grin with rage. 

gizz, face. 

glaizie, glossy. 

glint, .shine. 

gowan, daisy. 

gowd, gold. 

grat, wept. 

gree, prize. 

greet, weep. 

gude, guid, good. 

gude-man, householder. 

gude-willie, good-willed, hearty. 

gumlie, muddy. 



Glossary. 



^33 



ha\ hall. 

hae, have. 

haffets, temples (forehead). 

haflflins, half-way, i)artly. 

hain, spare, save. 

hain'd rig, hedgerow. 

hairst, harvest, 

haivers, havers, nonsense. 

halesome, wholesome. 

hallan, partition wall. 

haly, holy. 

hame, home. 

hap, cover, wrap. 

harn, coarse linen. 

haud, hold. 

hawkie, cow. 

heft, haft, handle. 

heugh, crag, steep bank. 

hing, hang. 

histie, dry. 

hizzie, hussy. 

hodden-gray, coarse undyed wool. 

houlet, owlet. 

howe-backet, hollow-backed. 

howk, dig. 

hurdles, hunkers, hips. 

icker, ear of corn, 
icy-boord, ice-cake, 
ilk, ilka, each, every, 
ingle, chimney-corner, 
ither, other. 

jauk, trifle, 
jaup, splash, 
jinker, speeder. 

kebbuck, cheese, 
kelpie, sprite, 
ken, know, 
ket, fleece. 

kiaugh, care, anxiety. 
kirk, church. 
kirn, churn, 
knaggie, bony. 



knowe, knoll, 
kye, pi. of cow. 

lag, slow. 

Lallan, Lowland. 

lane, lone. 

langsyne, long ago. 

lap, leapt. 

lave, rest, remainder. 

lay, ley, lea. 

lift, v., sky. 

lin, linn, waterfall. 

link, v., to skip. 

lint, flax. 

loon, rogue. 

lowe, flame. 

lowp, leap. 

lowse, loosen. 

lough, loch, lake. 

luve, love. 

luver, lover. 

lyart, gray. 

mae, more. 

mair, more. 

mak, make. 

marled, mottled. 

maun, must. 

mauna, must not. 

meere, mear, mare. 

meikle, mickle, muckle, much 

large, 
melder, quantity, measure, 
mense, tact, good manners, 
minnie, mother. 

na, not. 

nae, adj., no, not any. 

naig, nag. 

nappy, ale. 

neebor, neighbor. 

nighted, benighted. 

ony, any. 

ourie, shivering, drooping. 



134 



Selections from Burns. 



outowre, out over. 
owre, over. 

parritch, porridge, 
pattle, ploughshare, 
pawky, paukie, shrewd. 
penny-fee, small earnings, 
plough, plough. 
pouthery, powdery, 
pund, pounds. 

rair, roar. 

raize, stir, excite. 

rape, rope. 

rash-buss, clump of rushes. 

raw, row (e.g., of corn). 

rax, reach, stretch. 

ream, foam. 

red-wat-shod, ankle-deep in blood. 

reestit, singed. 

remead, remedy. 

riband, ribbon. 

rig, ridge, row. 

rigwoodie, wrinkled, wizened. 

ripp, handful of corn. 

riskit, crackled. 

row, rowe, to roll, to wrap. 

sae, so. 

sair, sore. 

sark, shift. 

saugh, willow. 

saul, soul. 

saumont-coble, salmon-skiff. 

saut, salt. 

sax, six. 

scaul, scold. 

scaur, scar, adj., timid; n., cliff. 

shaw, a wood. 

shog, shock. 

sic, "such. 

silly, simple. 

simmer, summer. 

skelp, n., slap ; v., hasten. 

skiegh, shy. 

sklent, slant. 



skriegh, screech, 
slap, gap. 
slee, sly. 
sleekit, sleek, 
slype, slip. 
smoor, smother, 
smoutie, dingy, smutty, 
snaw, snow. 

sneck-drawin, latch-lifting, sneak- 
ing, 
snell, keen, bitter. 
snoove, to jog steadily. 
sonsie, pleasant, jolly, 
sough, sugh, sigh. 
souter, cobbler, 
sowp, sup, draught, 
spairge, splash. 
spean, to wean. 
spence, inner room, 
spier, ask. 
sprattle, sprawl. 
spring, n., dance, 
spritty, fully of roots, 
spunkie, will-o'-wisp. 
stacher, stagger. 
stank, stagnant pool, 
stark, strong. 
staw, stole, 
steeve, stiff, staunch, 
sten, a leap, 
stey, steep. 
stimpart, measure, 
stookit, in stooks, or shocks, 
stour, harsh, 
stoure, conflict, tumult, 
stowp, stoup, drinking vessel, 
straught, straight, 
sturt, trouble, 
sumph, blockhead, dolt, 
swank, limber, supple, 
swats, ale. 
syne, since, ago. 

tawie, tame, tractable, 
tawtet, matted. 



Glossary. 



35 



tentie, careful. 

thir, these. 

thole, suffer, endure. 

thowe, thaw. 

thrave, a double stock of grain. 

tight, well-built. 

timmer, tinil:)er. 

tint, lost. 

tip, ram. 

tippenny, twopenny ale. 

tirl, to strip, to unroof. 

tither, the other. 

tocher, dowry. 

toun, town. 

tow, rope. 

towmond, twelvemonth. 

towsie, shagg}'. 

toyte, totter. 

twa, two. 

tyke, dog, cur. 

unco, adj., uncouth, strange 

adv., uncommonly, 
uncos, n., wonders, news. 



usquebae, whiskey. 

vauntie, vain, proud, 
vera, (idj., very; adv., true. 

wae, n., woe; adj., woeful, 
wale, choice, 
walie, robust. 
wanchancie, unlucky, 
wark-lume, work-loom, 
warl, warld, world, 
warlock, wizard, 
wauble, to reel, 
waught, draught, 
weeder-clips, weeding-shears. 
whaizle, wheeze, 
whyles, whiles, sometimes. 
winnock, window. 
wintle, stagger. 

yard, garden. 

yell, dry, giving no milk. 

yestreen, yester-even. 

yird, earth. 

yond, beyond. 




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